Current concept: Aaina is Born
November 12th, 2018
Finding meaning in reflections
We had a lot of back and forth regarding what name we wanted to give our AI. We were looking for a name that was simple and felt trustworthy, and at the same time was easy to connect to by people across the world.
For inspiration, we looked at a lot of different words such as water, guide, mentor, calm and comfort. We finally found our white whale in the word reflection — our concept centres around guiding the client through constructive reflection rather than telling them what to do.
We decided to name our AI ‘Aaina’, which stands for mirror in Hindi. We also tried to incorporate interesting twists on the word itself: a(AI)na contains the acronym for Artifical Intelligence within itself, and ‘Na’ means ‘Me’ in Korean. A-AI-NA ended up being the perfect representation of all members of our culturally diverse team! :)
Who is the voice of Aaina?
Our team believed that one of the defining factors of Aaina was going to be her voice. We wanted a voice that was soothing and relaxed, but at the same time felt mature and knowledgeable, someone you could trust and get advice from.
After looking through a lot of voices online, we decided to go ahead with the voice of one of our team members — Corine. She was really great at navigating the intonations required in a therapists voice, and handled the voice recordings with ease.
Onboarding users on to Aaina
The next step of the process was to decide how people got introduced to Aaina, and teaching new users how the interface worked. We wanted an experience that was seamless and captured the essence of what Aaina was.
Our on-boarding process was a great place to take users through this information, and we built out simple wireframes to decide what we might want to incorporate in them. Adding a layer of visual design based on our style guide gave us a series of 5 simple steps :
Putting the concept video together
Now that we had all our pieces in place, it was time to put it all together.
The individual sections:
- The name
- Form and interaction renderings
- Onboarding screens
- The script
- The voiceover
- Background music
It was important for people to understand what context Aaina would be used in, and we created storyboards for what we might want to show as part of the final video. We decided to move ahead with an intimate setting where our user persona -Anita felt comfortable talking to her therapist. Our shots were taken in our teammate Carlie’s house, who was gracious enough to let us use her bedroom for the setting.
The video introduces Anita sitting in her bedroom, feeling low after the loss of her boyfriend. She has heard of an AI ‘therapist’ that she can talk to through her friend, one that might help her navigate her feelings of sadness.
Final Presentation
D-day!
After a series of late nights and intense discussions, it was time to present our work to the rest of the world. We created a deck that took our class through our journey till date, through the ups and downs and how we landed on our final form. We also focused on the rationale behind some of the decisions we took, and our design imperatives.
Where do we go from here?
By the end of our presentation, we had received a lot of praise and an ever bigger list of things that we could improve on — great!!
Some of the good stuff:
“ Once Aaina got activated as the circle got filled with color, it actually looked like she came to life. The swirl of color gives her a very lifelike quality. I really like it.”
“The constant circular motion of the form makes it feel really trustworthy, and I can easily relate to your values for this project.”
“I love that the form makes me feel calm, I can see myself talking to something like this.”
Things we can work on:
“I felt that the difference in visual form of the speaking and listening state was a little high, rather than playing around with all three elements (size, opacity and blur) try playing around with just one element. That might give you more interesting results.”
“The listening state makes me feel that the AI is receding back, and I would like it if it felt more active.”
“I’d love to see more connections between emotions and colors, it would be great to explore different colors that work with your color palate.”
This was an amazing learning experience for our team, from thinking about the different factors that go into making an AI therapist to actually visualising its form. After working through some of the feedback we have received, we are excited to jump into the next phase of our project!
