[Press Release] Ethical AI startup Asya raises pre-seed round to launch mindful conversation app
Asya, a Riga and Manchester-based tech startup, is out to help with the drop in attention span and communication skills of people in the modern smartphone era. Asya’s an AI-powered app that listen to a user’s voice in the conversations with others and provides real-time feedback on the conversation’s quality — all done in an ethical manner that protects the privacy of all participants. The Latvia-based startup today announces the closing of a 120,000 Euro pre-seed funding round led by Change Ventures and joined by the BuildIT Latvia accelerator, that will fund the launch of the app this summer.
“Mindful communication is about being aware of the choices we are making and of our thinking and reasoning. The world of smartphones has distanced us from our fellow human beings and this concerned us, so we set out to fix it. My cofounder Evald’s years of AI research led to the development of some ground-breaking models to analyse a conversation’s tempo, emotions and balance in real time and this app is our attempt to hand people a tool with which they can become better conversationalists”, said co-founder Ariel Tabaks.
The Asya app records the pattern of conversation (without retaining the actual words, thereby protecting privacy) and reports to the user statistics on whether the user is listening for an appropriate proportion of the conversation, whether they pause enough to make messages sink in, and soon will also provide insights on the emotional impact of their conversation. The real-time conversation feedback is communicated in a beautiful visual form via a flower that blooms based on the analytics. These statistics can be viewed over time in the app and used to enable long-term improvements in conversational habits.
The Managing Partner of lead investor Change Ventures immediately saw the opportunity upon the first meeting. “The mindfulness industry is booming right now, driven by the mobile app revolution — just witness the billion dollar valuation of meditation app Calm. Asya adds a new dimension, helping users understand how to make their conversations more mindful and leveraging very sophisticated AI models to do so. Further, the Asya team has already thought about how to protect the privacy of users from day one.”
Sign-up to join the waiting list for Asya app on www.asya.ai. The app is invitation based and the first users to sign-up will have a chance to try it out sooner.
