Interaction [in-ter-ak-shuhn]
noun.
: reciprocal action, effect, or influence.
Quick Recap:
Stay in touch w/ Friends
We are building a simple v0.1 of BetterFriend app by using chatbot to remind people their loved one’s birthday with AI.
How smart?
In a world where we can have a full therapy like discussions with ChatGPT today, any app can use an AI API to create a very rich interaction with the users. But most apps don’t need this and it is a total distraction.
Just imagine if the Uber / rideshare app wanted to chat with us while we just wanted to order a car?
Or a food delivery app asks us about our day when we just want to order food?
It’s actually strange to limit the capabilities of something so powerful. We can see in the picture here that there’s hardly any interactions from the bot when the user is trying to have a normal conversation. It’s just trying to store and retrieve information.
I had to ask myself, “Is this good?” and “What can be better?”
Do I want this app to just give information that’s important for the users?
Do I want it to suggest more things? Such as prompting questions to help them write a better birthday message to their friends?
In the future, what about reminding them about what happened in the past or what happened recently in the life of their friends?
It begs the question of how far do I want to go on the topic of helping people manage their personal relationships beyond just sending birthday reminders.
Going back to start:
I started with the simple mission to not feel guilty about others remembering my birthday when I don’t remember theirs. The pain point was obvious - not remembering birthdays was embarrassing.
But the need is much bigger than this.
At the age of 34, I’ve lived in 6 different cities, I have friends from all stages of life. I need a simple way to categorize my friends in order to stay in touch.
Then there’s more - the new friends that you are trying to get to know more. Those are typically the hardest to manage for me. On a weekly basis, I don’t even have time to talk to all of my old friends. It’s hard to have room for new friends unless we are intentional.
Inspired by Linear:
I’ve decided to be more opinionated about how I structure these. I believe the world needs more opinionated software that are bold with the right purpose in mind. My purpose is to “Keep up w/ Old Friends, Make New Friends.”
Here I’ve created my own version of our personal relationship categories:
Partner - girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, wife, partner
Family - Brother, Sister, Mother, Father, Mom, Dad, Son, Daughter, Step Mother, Step Father, Son-in-Law, Daughter-in-law, Brother-in-law, Sister-in-law
Extended Family - cousin, grandparents, grandma, grandpa, grand mother, grand father, aunt, uncle, niece, nephew, great aunt, great uncle
Lifelong Friends - 2 or more lifestages typically 5+ years
Close Friends - 1 or more lifestages Typically 2+ years
New Friends - Current life stage. 1-2 years
Lifestages:
Childhood (5-7 years)
Elementary or Middle School (6-8 years)
High School (3-4 years)
University or College (4 years)
First Career - Year 1 to Year 5 of working experience
Second Career - Year 5 to Year 10 of working experience
Third Career - Year 10 to Year 20 of working experience
Fourth Career - Year 20 to Year 30 of working experience
Fifth Career - Year 30 to Year 40 of working experience
In most cases, most people would have very few lifelong friends, a few more close friends, and many more new friends.
Same with Family (few) vs. Extended Family (many)
So the top categories:
Highest Importance - Partner / Family / Lifelong Friends
Second - Close Friends / Extended Family
Third - New Friends
If you have other ways to categorize relationships you have in your life, I would love to hear it. This has become the foundation of what I want to build for BetterFriend v1 beyond this chatbot.
I’ve incorporated it in the app for the Beta to categorize these relationships. It may be a bit little long but it’s a good first attempt to create a schema for the database for the AI to extract data and store them accordingly.
See ya tomorrow!
(⚡️BetterFriend Project Day 8 - 38)