Alden isn't a single window. It's designed to feel like an AI presence you can reach in two different ways depending on what a moment calls for, the Orb and the Workspace. They aren't a "basic mode" and an "advanced mode." They're two surfaces onto the same assistant, sharing the same memory and the same conversation, so switching between them never means starting over.
The Orb is a floating, always-on 3D presence and Alden's default interface. There's no visible transcript by default, you say the wake word, Alden is listening, and the conversation runs as real-time speech-to-speech, not the older record-transcribe-reply pattern. It's built to feel like the back-and-forth of an actual conversation rather than a voice command queue.
The Orb is where you'd reach for Alden when your hands are busy, when you want to think out loud, or when typing would just get in the way of a quick request, "check if that file finished downloading," "what's on my calendar this afternoon," "start filling out that form I had open." Alden's voice on the Orb is calm, precise, and quietly confident, with a restrained dry humor, its own presence, not a copy of anything else.
Open the Workspace alongside the Orb when you want a text-based view of what's happening, a sidebar, a chat log, files, and project history. It's the right surface when a task has more moving parts than a spoken exchange can comfortably hold: reviewing a multi-step workflow before it runs, reading back what Alden actually did, or working through something that benefits from being written down rather than said out loud.
Because the Workspace and the Orb share the same underlying memory, you can start a request by voice and check on it in the Workspace later, or start typing in the Workspace and finish the conversation out loud. Neither surface is a lesser version of the other, they're just suited to different moments.
In practice, most people don't choose once and stick with it, they move between the two within the same session. Voice for the quick, conversational parts; the Workspace for anything you want to see laid out, review carefully, or revisit later. Both surfaces route every action through the same Governance Engine, so switching interfaces never changes what Alden is and isn't allowed to do without asking you first, see our post on governance-first AI for more on how that works.