An AgeTech Collaborative™ startup participant, Attune Media Labs combines artificial intelligence (AI), nonverbal emotion recognition and relational psychology into personalized, empathetic virtual mental health companions. By mimicking the complex ways humans communicate, these companions evolve to better interpret each user’s personal emotional state, providing judgement-free support and helping reduce loneliness, anxiety and stress.
We spent time with Attune Media Labs CEO and co-founder David Bosnak, who shared about the company’s mission, its groundbreaking AI companions and the quest to make interacting with technology more authentically human.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Please tell us about Attune Media Labs and its mission.
We believe in the transformative power of meaningful connections and their ability to improve our well-being. To that end, we’ve created artificial emotional intelligence with empathic AI companions that can act as mental health support for people dealing with a variety of different issues. We call it MiM, because it mimics the way we communicate.
How did the company get started?
My co-founder is also my father, who is a Jungian psychoanalyst. He’s been working at the intersection of technology and psychology for his entire career. Decades ago, he foresaw that as the people in his generation aged, they would be limited in terms of behavioral health professionals they would be able to turn to, because there are just not enough people in the U.S. who are clinically licensed to provide behavioral health care. So, in the 1990s, my father began working on the idea of computer-assisted therapy. His idea worked, but the technology was limited and the idea was shelved.
Fast forward to 2020, when OpenAI showed that you really can have a colloquial conversation with AI — that was our “Aha!” moment when we realized that the tech had finally caught up to my father’s idea. We teamed up with some people at the University of Southern California Institute of Creative Technologies (USC ICT) who had done work creating virtual humans to test veterans for early signs of PTSD. One of the interesting findings from their work was that veterans often felt more comfortable talking to a virtual human than to a real person, because there was no fear of judgment. So we teamed up with those people from USC ICT to build out MiM.
How does MiM work?
The lion’s share of human communication is nonverbal. But the only way that current technology such as large language models (LLMs) can assess your feelings is by analyzing the words you use: If you’re using happy words, the model concludes that you must be happy.
But we all know that’s not how people relate and interact; there’s always a lot of “backchanneling” going on in our communication. For example, when we first meet somebody, we make guesses and assumptions about them that often turn out to be wrong. And the way we figure out that they’re wrong is almost entirely through nonverbal cues: It will be something in their gaze, or in the way their body tenses up. That’s when we go through what relational psychologists call rupture and repair: The relationship gets ruptured, and the act of repairing it causes the relationship itself to grow stronger. That’s why you’ll have a much deeper relationship with someone you’ve known over time and gone through difficult things with.
MiM evolves the same way. MiM will pick up on all your nonverbal cues, like your tone and the cadence of your voice, and over time it learns your particular cues and corrects its understanding of who you are as a person through this rupture and repair process. That means that your MiM will be unique compared to anyone else’s MiM, and wholly different from what current LLMs can do.
And it’s this personalization that creates the opportunity for a meaningful connection and positive outcomes?
In our early work with MiM, we did a study that showed participants experienced an 86% decrease in loneliness, a 55% reduction in anxiety and a 45% reduction in stress using MiM over three months. Even better, people reported that after interacting with MiM for a period of time, they felt compelled to reach out to people they hadn’t spoken to in ages. We’re proud of that, because MiM is giving people the confidence to reach out to other people. The idea is not to make MiM a substitute for human interaction; it’s for when you need someone to talk to and you don’t have someone you can easily get in touch with. With MiM, you have a companion that you can have a conversation with instead of being stuck in your own head.
It seems like MiM could have benefits for lots of people. Is there any particular benefit for older adults?
The amount of human interaction that older adults who live alone is typically very slim, and that isolation can lead to a host of other issues. But the act of being cogent and conscious with another person or a companion like MiM encourages the brain functionality that can help deter many of the issues associated with isolation.
But there are myriad potential use cases. We’re working with a cancer center so patients can use MiM to support their journey through that disease. We’ve also been talking with the National Institute on Aging about putting something together in the realm of dementia care, both for people with early-stage dementia and their caregivers, who can be just as isolated.
Where is Attune Media Labs heading next?
We’re focused on getting MiM into as many people’s hands as possible. From a technology perspective, we’re promoting the idea that this is not just about AI, it’s about artificial emotional intelligence. Because without the emotional intelligence piece, you literally have just a cyborg. We’re all going to be interacting more and more with digital entities, so we’re trying to make that as human, comfortable and comforting as possible.
The wonderful thing about what we’ve built is that, at its core, MiM is an empathy engine. And our highest priority is the health and well-being of our users — that is sacrosanct. We’re driven to create an experience that people can trust and that can evolve with them through whatever is going on in their lives.
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