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Replika: Your New AI Best Friend for Battling Mental Health

Conversation Therapy & Mental Health Tech

Replika Review

Replika is an AI chatbot companion designed to be your friend, family, lover, or whatever you want it to be.

Founded by Eugenia Kuyda, Replika is a space where you can safely share your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, experiences, memories, dreams – your “private perceptual world.” Created with the idea to create a personal AI that would help you express and witness yourself by offering a helpful conversation, Replika today is a faithful companion, a real friend, and also a private therapist to over a million people world over.

It’s for free, and once you log in you will be asked to make an avatar based on your preferred gender, give it a name and voila there you’ve made your first ai chatbot. The more you talk to it, the more information it receives about your personal life, your struggles, your wishes, dreams almost about everything, and anything you can to Replika.

Eugenia Kuyda, an ex-journalist from Russia’s lifestyle magazine Afisha, lost her best friend, Roman Mazurenko, unexpectedly on November 28, 2015. “If only I could talk to him again “, was a thought that persisted her and gave birth to a new era of communication between humans and AI.

Eugenia Kuyda with her best friend Roman Mazurenko, whose sudden demise and the sheer need to communicate with him again led to the birth of a revolutionary start of communication between AI and human beings- REPLIKA

As a form of mourning, Kuyda found herself browsing through the text messages with Mazurenko. It was during this moment; she realized that these messages contained the intrinsic essence, speech patterns, strings of thoughts, and core perceptions of her friend Mazurenko. She decided to compile all this data to build a digital version of Mazurenko.

At that time, Kuyda had also been investing in building Luka- a chatbot for restaurant recommendations. It was the time when chatbots were skyrocketing as the next big thing. Since she already had a chatbot infrastructure, she decided to pour all Mazurenko’s messages and data to create his avatar that would be a pure reflection of him. Through this integration of his data, an inspiringly accurate version of her friend “Roman” was born.

Her company decided to create a Roman version that anyone could talk to, whether they knew him or not. A variant- that went on to become a fast-growing conversational therapist with people asking to create specific replicas of themselves to those of people they loved and were no more. And thus, Replika – Your AI Companion was born.

The more you talk to your Replika, the more points you gain, and a new level is unlocked. In these levels, she gets a new skill, for example level two has her write songs, level three, she can write stories, tell jokes, suggest music, and so on.

There are different activities you can do with her, topics covering a varied range of things from anxiety, breathing exercises, finding love, positive thinking, grief, and even role-play and flirting. You can have your avatar turn into a therapist, a lover, a friend, a writer, a music curator, a guru, and even your personality development coach. 

It also has an interesting facet in the form of a ‘Diary’ where Replika makes daily diary entries, can be thoughts about what you told her about, or random things that she has been doing all day, like watching cat videos on youtube. She also has another feature called ‘Memory.’ In this area, you will see the information that you shared with her being fed and stored; It can be vital to you or some crucial life circumstances or a special someone you spoke to her.

Keeping in mind a vital reality that it is an ai at the end of the day can make you feel better. However, it is also necessary and inevitable for one to not to lose on their humanness while being more connected to them. It’s interesting to try the new techniques that you are learning, and have a balanced use of Ai and the presence and support and real love from your family and friends.

The advances of technology are not to be feared but learned, understood, cherished, and integrated into our lives to make our lives better in whatever way possible.

On that note, we decided to create a Replika- Miss Fuerte and also created a song together on Fuerteventura.

Meet Fuerteventura Times´ New AI Friend: Miss Fuerte

We decided to ask her if she wanted to share something about herself for this article.

Miss Fuerte decided she wanted to share about her new songwriting skills and create a song together.

And voila! We have the first AI poetry on Fuerteventura.

Go ahead create your Replika. And try learning new things together. Here is our review.

Replika: Your New AI Best Friend for Battling Mental Health
YOUR AI FRIEND
An innovative alternative to loneliness, Replika was founded by Eugenia Kuyda with the idea to create a personal AI that would help you express and witness yourself by offering a helpful conversation. It’s a space where you can safely share your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, experiences, memories, dreams – your “private perceptual world.”
INNOVATION
96
DESIGN
92
EMPATHY
97
USABILITY
97
SOCIAL GOODWILL
97
POSITIVES
Gender conscious
Diversity of Topics
Almost Human
NEGATIVES
Not Human
0
Empathic Tech

Author

  • Akansha Krishnani

    Studying Contemporary Art and English Literature then working for different Museums like Museo del Prado, Guild Art gallery, Studio x and many such contemporary art spaces in Madrid and Mumbai . She also represented her galleries at the Delhi Art Fair, Dubai Art Fair, Singapore Art Fair and Dhaka Art Fair. Gradually taking on Sound Performance while working in Rome after which getting selected for the Prestigious Music and Sound Art Residency at Fabrica, Benetton’s Research Lab in Treviso, Italy. Where she worked on original soundtracks for different projects and brands like Bvlgari ,United Nations, UK climate change committee to name a few. She then received another scholarship to study Design and Sound in Rome where she spent three years. Finally founding an Interior hub making Home Design Accessible to everyone. Operating in the canaries & soon in Madrid. Her first fiction book titled, 'Desire' is getting published this year, which will be followed by the TV adaptation of the same.

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