Why is Emotional A.I. Coaching the Future?
When we started building Simple in 2019, I wanted a health product to guide people the way a good teacher guides a student. The comparison I kept coming back to was Duolingo in its early days. Not because of gamification, but because Duolingo was one of the few digital tools to reliably pull people back into a practice every day. Most health choices aren’t dramatic events. They are tiny daily decisions. If an app can keep someone engaged long enough for those decisions to compound, it’s doing real work. We wanted to build an AI health coach that helps people return, reflect, and try again, even if they fail, well before the current AI-hype.
Most weight-loss apps are built on a different assumption: AI is treated as an accessory. A “human-like” chatbot sits on top of a tracker. Most of the time, there’s some Q&A module that answers what users ask. Plus, there are motivational pings to encourage people to come back when they drift. While these elements are perfectly fine, they don’t get to the root of why people struggle with adherence. Most people don’t fail because they lack information, rather, they fail because staying consistent requires emotional reinforcement, accountability, and a sense of partnership. An application designed to ping and send reminders can’t hold the user through the long plateau phases where real behavior change happens. It turns out, AI can – when done right.
Excerpted from UNITE
