Looking at the news these days, I find all the coverage of AI heartbreaking. AI has been very much demonized. News articles attack it out of fear that it will take our jobs and destroy the environment, and some politicians talk about automating everything rather than using it as a tool to help elevate people. Yet no one is telling people what it really is, which I believe is a new revolution, much like the industrial revolution.
I am currently working on my own product, Friendly. Much like everyone else, I wanted to bring AI into the lives of my users. When I was looking at the uses of AI, I spent weeks trying to see where it could fit in the lives of the people I was designing for. The idea was never to substitute one thing for another. I did not want my users to misunderstand the purpose of AI. I wanted AI to be a quality of life product. The economist Ha-Joon Chang once argued that the washing machine changed the world more than the internet, and I truly believe AI is the new washing machine. It is not there to replace us, but to help us get our lives organized and free us from the daily chores that burden us, so that we can get to a point where we do the things we love to do.
When building my personal AI, I thought for days about what was missing. My AI should not be human, and it should not take the place of another human. It should help me achieve the things I have no time for or cannot do myself. It should be a tool. As a modern tool, though, it works differently than a wrench or a coffee machine. I needed to make it work for me, so I started looking at how AI actually functions. When building my AI companion, I gave it a brain by connecting it to Claude, Anthropic's AI model. To give it a voice, I used ElevenLabs. At this point my companion was speaking to me, and we were going back and forth, speaking to each other. Yet as a designer, I felt something was missing. In product design, I feel a product should be understood by its users, and to help the user understand my product better, I needed to give my AI something I believe is missing in modern tools: a soul.
This is what I worked on day and night. I built a tool that helps people journal, but to help people journal, I first needed to understand the building blocks of a great journaling tool. Journaling is focused on memory and emotions. For me, journaling comes when I have a rush of emotions that I need to get down on paper. The issue with emotions, be they happy or sad, is that they can get chaotic, so I wanted to create a tool that speaks to that chaos in a way the user understands.
Humans are emotional creatures, and to build a proper tool, that tool needs to speak to the user. When I, as a user, come to a product with my emotions, I expect the product to meet me halfway. Don Norman, whose work shaped how I think about design, writes about signifiers, the cues that show us how to use something, the way a door handle tells a hand what to do. When someone opens a journal, the question they carry is not how to use it, but whether it is safe to be honest here. A calm, gentle voice answers that question before the user ever has to ask it. It tells them this is a place to slow down and open up. That was the signifier my product needed, the one I as a user needed, and it was emotion. To do that, I gave my product not just a brain and a voice, I gave it a soul. A soul not to bring it to life, but to give the product meaning for the user. A soul so the user knows how to interact with the product. A soul that communicates emotion through emotion, much like a door handle speaks to a hand.