I think it's fair to say you can have agent coworkers and human coworkers. When a company adopts a named and gendered coworker product as a "new hire", it probably feels more threatening, like you're introducing a single, named entity to take over 5 people's jobs. Have always thought this functionality is more like an AI computer than an AI coworker, but the category has named itself and I think the vendors and builders of AI coworkers are responsible for how much or how little anthropomorphism is included out of the box.
Thanks. :) I posted this below, but in case you missed it, we agree. We have a new landing page getting ready to launch. Here's a preview of what we're working towards:
Edit: We're working on a new landing page that we think does a better job of describing what our product does and is responsive and mobile friendly: http://screencast.com/t/IZnoWChXyQ
At the risk of sounding too "corporatey" again, but to answer the original question of what Waffle does: Yes, Waffle is a kanban-style, "Trello-like" board view of your GitHub Issues. Waffle allows you to effectively use GitHub Issues more effectively for project management (for instance, the board view helps with prioritizing work and visualizing what in progress. You can also do things like view all of your Issues across multiple GitHub repositories on a single board.)
Waffle uses GitHub Issues as your board's data model, so any changes you make in GitHub are also reflected on your Waffle board (for example, we'll move issues into the "Done" column of your board when you merge any commits into your default branch that use the fixes/solves/closes GitHub Issues syntax.) We're working towards automating even more movement of Issues across your Waffle board based on actions you already take in GitHub.
To give you a real example, I recently talked with the founder of Neovim who chose Waffle to manage their large open source project (https://waffle.io/blog/2014/04/17/open-source-spotlight-neov...). The main reason they used Waffle over Trello was the integration with GitHub Issues (the Trello-Github integration options aren't great, and there's difficulty around trying to get people to update the status of work in a tool that doesn't tightly integrate with all of GitHub's Issues, commits, PR's, etc.)