Replika

Replika “is an AI friend that is always there for you” that you grow through conversation. It sells itself as “a safe space to share thoughts and feelings without fear of being judged” and “save the moments from your daily life that matter most.”

Two interesting things I want to point out are:

The feedback modal that pops up a couple minutes into a conversation. What is its purpose? Does a response affect the the model Replika is building for you? In some ways, it pulls you out of the conversation and instead of focusing on language, you are now focusing on a modal.

Experience points. Why did Replika institute them? I somewhat understand the desire to add gamification to the experience. But, I am not entirely sure what the levels represent and how they benefit me. It would be interesting to see how this aspect of Replika affects it users, does it motivate them to keep coming back and reach the next level, or does it end up being a piece of extrinsic motivation, where once they reach a certain level, the user just ends up getting rid of their account? Better yet, what is the true purpose of Replika, is it to build more intelligent AI models or truly build an “AI friend.”

It is also interesting to note that it looks to be built on top of CakeChat “a dialog system that is able to express emotions in a text conversation.” Cakechat can be used to:

• “Condition responses on a certain author of messages (persona ID) to make responses lexically similar to them and mimic someone’s linguistic style in a conversation.”
• Chat with a certain emotion. “CakeChat only uses five basic emotions (anger, sadness, joy, fear and neutral).”
• “set… [a] topic… that will condition the model’s responses.” For instance, if you want to talk about colors, you could condition your model to talk about colors.

Connection

One aspect I can take from Replika is the implementation of gamification. Is it effective or not? Regardless, I will need to ensure that aspects should not be added to the artifacts I create if they do not allow for more productive conversation.