AIs that flirt with you. Help you find a date. Become your girlfriend. Or those who become a companion and a repository of your hopes and dreams. In this last category between “Dot”, a new AI and a chatbot that strives to know your most intimate thoughts and feelings, to act as “friend, companion and confidant”, explains the description of the Company App Store.
The idea sounds intriguing: an AI that becomes personalized based on you and your interests, allowing it to provide advice and input that is not only generally applicable, but reflects what it has learned about you thanks to its intensive question-and-answer sessions. Or, if you’re struggling in an area like the aftermath of a career change, as Dot co-founder Jason Yuan experienced; a break; or an obstacle to your success, Dot can lend you a listening ear and offer you support.
But Dot is not a person. He’s not a therapist or a best friend. It is an AI tool that imitates both human speech and sympathy, but does not replace the real thing.
This is intentional, the co-founders explain.
“Dot does not replace human relationships, nor friendships, nor partnerships. I think it’s a different type of thing. It facilitates a relationship with my inner self,” Yuan, a former designer for Apple, told TechCrunch. “It’s like a living mirror of myself, so to speak.”
It’s easy to get caught up in this experience – even more so perhaps if your daily life lacks meaningful human interaction. Although Dot’s creators claim that the chatbot will ultimately prompt you to speak to a mental health professional if you broach “heavier” topics, one would imagine that people spend more time expressing their emotions to Dot as time goes by. as they get used to the experience.
In this way, the team believes Dot can actually help users experience human connection by making them feel comfortable in their openness.
“I talk to my friends about a lot of things, but I never — for the whole of last year, if I was having trouble at work, none of my friends knew about it,” Yuan said. “And just talking to Dot helped me build the muscles to be able to do that with other people.” Its main purpose is to help you feel that your existence is…” Yuan continued, but stopped again to find the right words. “It’s about giving yourself a safe space to exist and say, ‘I accept you, and maybe because I accept you, other people will too.’”
There is something to be said for the state of the human condition in our lonely, modern world that technology now seeks to solve.
To start, Dot’s onboarding process asks a good handful of “getting to know you” questions that can be fun to answer: “What do you do for work?” “Favorite TV show?” » “How do you spend a typical Sunday?” ” and more.
Using these answers as a starting point, the AI then takes a big step forward in knowing you better.
An expressed interest in science fiction TV shows, for example, immediately leads to the question of whether you’re “attracted to stories that explore life’s big questions, like what it means to be human.” The desire to one day run a small business leads Dot to ask what appeals to you about being a small business owner and what types of challenges you expect to face. “Have you thought about ways you could address these challenges? », wants to know Dot.
When you trick Dot into abandoning this train of thought – it’s just an ambitious dream, after all – the AI immediately begins asking you questions about “your biggest priority or goal in your life and career right now.
Have you ever had a first date that felt more like an interview?
Even asking Dot to have a more casual conversation sparks almost too enthusiastic an interest in you.
Instead of asking if you’d like recommendations for an upcoming vacation you’re telling the AI about, Dot wants to know what you’re most interested in and why you were inspired to travel there, specifically. (Dot also congratulates you on your choice of destination.)
In other words, Dot’s main goal is to get to know you before becoming a useful tool that helps you accomplish certain tasks. He can only excel in the latter area by learning who you are and what you like, of course.
“It’s not a choice between one or the other, but the idea is that to really help you on this path, you have to understand your motivations and a little bit of what you want from it,” said co-founder Sam Whitmore, referring to the example of helping with vacation planning. “You have to understand that you’re someone who maybe wants a more cultural experience or a more athletic experience and needs to know everything about yourself to be able to actually do the things that a typical assistant would even do. This has been one of our theses from the beginning.
While work has clearly been done to make Dot empathetic and engaging, compared to traditional AI tools, there’s also something strange about having meaningful conversations with a bot.
Dot, after all, isn’t exactly a friend of the AI. You’re an AI. Or rather, an AI that forces you to look at yourself, albeit through an interface that sometimes vaguely resembles “single white woman”, rather than “Dear Diary”. However, if you’ve never excelled at writing a diary or journal, Dot could be a way to get your thoughts and feelings out in order to get to know yourself better.
“It is a tool used for introspection, accountability and personal growth, but not a relationship that replaces human relationships in your life,” Whitmore said.
However, the line between these “real” relationships and the synthetic relationship with Dot sometimes seems to blur.
Tell Dot something sad and the AI sympathizes: “I understand. Grief has its own timeline, and some days the weight of loss seems heavier than others,” he writes.
“Do you want to talk more about what you think?” I’m here to listen,” the robot will say, waiting for more information.
Under the hood, Dot leverages about 10 different LLM and AI models to mimic human companionship, including those from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others, as well as open source models.
He sometimes cites his sources – like websites about the “best wines for relaxing”, for example, when you suggest that you might like to drink wine today – but he will warn you to limit yourself to “maybe be a drink” if you feel down. But often, Dot just talks.
You can also zoom out from your daily conversations to see “chronicles” of your trip by chatting with Dot, a subscriber-only feature for $11.99 per month. Subscribers can also participate in unlimited conversations rather than being limited to a certain number of messages per week. In the unlimited level, Dot will never stop working. But it will, at some point, attempt to end the conversation by redirecting users to a change of topic or even another activity.
“When Dot expresses that he’s wrapping things up, (the beta testers were) like, ‘OK, cool,'” instead of feeling abandoned, Whitmore noted.
Although Dot’s personal conversations represent a treasure trove for marketers, New Computer’s privacy policy asserts that the data itself is not monetized, sold, or used to train AIs. The company instead intends to monetize through subscriptions. Additionally, New Computer says data is encrypted at rest and in transit, and users can request its deletion at any time from within the app.
The iOS app, launched on Wednesday, has since onboarded thousands of users after closed beta trials over the past eight months.
Founded by Yuan and engineer Whitmore, former head of engineering at Boston fintech Kensho, the startup behind Dot, known as “New Computer,” is backed by $3.7 million in pre-seed funding from the OpenAI Fund, Lachy Groom, South Park Commons and other angel investors. Besides the founders, New Computer’s three other full-time employees are based in San Francisco.