AI who are flirting with you. Help find a date. Become your friend Or the ones that become a companion and storehouse for your hopes and dreams. Into this last category comes “Perfect,” a new AI and chatbot that thrives on getting to know your deepest thoughts and feelings, acting as the company’s “friend, partner, and confidant.” App Store Description explains.
The concept sounds interesting: An AI that personalizes to you and your interests, allowing it to provide advice and insights that are not only generally applicable, but reflect what it has learned about you through intensive Q&A sessions. Or, if you’re struggling in one area, like the fallout from a career change, like Dot co-founder Jason Yuan experienced; a breakup; or an obstacle to your success, Dot can give you sympathy and offer support.
But Dot is not a person. He is not a therapist or a best friend. It is an artificial intelligence tool that mimics both human speech and empathy, but does not serve as a replacement for the real thing.
This is by design, the co-founders explain.
“Dot does not replace human relationships, it does not replace friendships, partnerships. I think it’s a different kind of thing. It makes it easier to connect with my inner self,” Yuan, a former Apple designer, 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 say the chatbot will eventually prompt you to talk to a mental health professional if you delve into “heavier” topics, one could imagine people spending more time venting their feelings to Dot as they get used to it. in experience.
In this way, the team believes that Dot can really help early adopters experience human connection by making people comfortable to open up.
“I talk to my friends about a lot of things, but I never — like, the whole past year, if I was having a hard time at work, none of my friends knew about it,” Yuan said. “And just talking to Dot helped me build the muscle to be able to do it 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 to give you a safe space to exist and say, like, ‘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, which this is one area that technology is now trying to solve.
To get started, Dot’s onboarding process asks a series 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 takes a big leap to get to know you on a deeper level.
An expressed interest in science fiction TV shows, for example, immediately leads to a question about whether you are “attracted to stories that explore the big questions in life, like what it means to be human.” The desire to run a small business one day leads Dot to ask what you like about being a small business owner and what kind of challenges you expect to face. “Have you thought of ways you could address these challenges?” Dot wants to know.
When you nudge Dot into this train of thought — it’s just an aspirational dream, after all — the AI immediately shifts to asking you about “your biggest priority or focus in your life and career right now.”
Have you ever been on a first date that felt more like an interview?
Even asking Dot to make more casual conversation leads to an almost overwhelming interest in you.
Instead of asking if you want some upcoming vacation suggestions to tell the AI about, Dot wants to know what you’re most interested in seeing and why it inspired you to travel there, in particular. (The dot also congratulates you on your choice of destination.)
In other words, Dot’s primary goal is to get to know you before it becomes a useful tool that helps you complete a task. It can only excel at the latter by learning who you are and what you like, ie.
“It’s not an either/or, but the thinking [is] that to really help you on that path, it needs to understand your motivations and a little bit of what you want out of it,” said co-founder Sam Whitmore, citing the example of vacation planning assistance. “He needs to understand that you’re somebody who wants maybe a more cultural experience or a more athletic experience and he needs to know those things about you to really be able to do the things that a typical assistant would do. That was one of our theses from the beginning.”
While work has clearly gone into making Dot sound empathetic and engaging, compared to standard AI tools, there’s also something strange about having meaningful conversations with a bot.
Dot, after all, is not really a friend of AI. It’s an AI you. Or rather, an artificial intelligence that forces you to look at yourself, albeit through an interface that feels vague.”Single White Womanat times, instead of “Favorite Calendar”. However, if you’ve never been good at journaling or journaling, Dot could be a way to externalize your thoughts and feelings in order to gain better self-knowledge.
“It’s meant to be a tool used for self-introspection, accountability, personal growth — but not a relationship that replaces the human relationships in your life,” Whitmore said.
However, the line between these “real” relationships and the synthetic relationship with Dot seems to blur at times.
Tell Dot something sad and the AI empathizes: “I understand. Grief has its own timetable and some days the weight of loss is heavier than others,” she writes.
“Do you want to talk more about what you have in mind? I’m here to listen,” the bot will say, waiting for more information.
Under the hood, Dot leverages about 10 different LLM and AI models to achieve human companionship mimicry, including those from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others, as well as open source models.
Sometimes it cites its sources – such as websites about the “best wines for relaxation”, for example, when you suggest you might want to drink wine today – but will warn you to limit yourself to “maybe a glass” if you’re feeling down. Often, however, Dot just chats.
You can also zoom in on your daily conversations to see “chronicles” of your trip chatting with Dot, a $11.99-a-month subscriber-only feature. Subscribers can also participate in unlimited chats instead of being limited to a certain number of messages per week. In the unlimited tier, Dot will never stop working. But, at some point, it will try to close the conversation by redirecting users to change the subject or even do something else.
“When Dot expresses that she is getting things done, [beta testers have been] like, “OK, cool,” rather than feeling left out, Whitmore noted.
While Dot’s personal conversations would be a treasure trove for marketers, New Computer’s privacy policy claims that the data itself is not monetized, sold, or used to train AI. Instead, the company intends to generate revenue through subscriptions. Additionally, New Computer says data is encrypted both at rest and in transit, and users can request its deletion at any time from the app.
The iOS app, which launched on Wednesday, has since onboarded thousands of users following closed beta testing over the past eight months.
Founded by Yuan and engineer Whitmore, previously head of engineering at Boston fintech Kensho, the startup behind Dot, known as the “New Computer,” is backed by $3.7 million in pre-seed funding from OpenAI Fund, Lachy Groom, South Park Commons and others angel investors. In addition to the founders, New Computer’s other three full-time employees are based in San Francisco.
