Jenny Hsiao is a practicing physician and a medical resident at Harvard University. During the pandemic, Hsiao realized that isolated people were suffering neurological effects and they needed support. This prompted her to leave her medical career and training at Harvard to start providing an AI assistant called Robyn.
Robyn aims to be an empathetic and emotionally intelligent AI for people.
Navigating human relationships with AI assistants can be a tricky area. On the one hand, there are general purpose chatbots like ChatGPT. On the other hand, there are companion/friendship/avatar apps like Character.AI, Replika, Friend, and even therapy apps like Feeling Great. A July survey showed that 72% of U.S. teens have used an AI companion app. These apps have been accused of contributing to multiple people’s suicides through various lawsuits.
Hsiao said he is trying to position Robin as neither a friendship app nor a replacement for therapists or clinicians.
“As a doctor, I have seen things go bad when technology companies try to replace doctors. Robin is not even now a clinical (replacement). It corresponds to someone who knows you well. Usually their role is to support you. You can think of Robin as your spiritual and intellectual partner,” Xiao said.
The founder said that with Robin, her startup set out to recreate the way humans remember things. Mr. Hsiao previously studied human memory in the laboratory of Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000. Shao said they brought these learnings into Robyn so the AI can better understand users.
Robyn, available on iOS, has an onboarding process similar to many journaling and mental health apps. The app asks you about yourself, your goals, how you react when challenged, and what tone Robin would respond in.
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Once you’re onboarded, you can chat with Robyn about a variety of topics. For example, when I asked them to create a morning routine, they asked a lot of questions and had an in-depth conversation about getting a minimum amount of screen time to start the day.
As you chat with Robin, the app gives you more insight into your patterns and also explains various characteristics about you, including your emotional fingerprint, attachment style, love language, growth edge, and inner critic. The startup has also created a demo website to analyze X’s profile and provide insight into what kind of insights you can get from Robyn.
Xiao said the company takes safety seriously and put guardrails in place even when it was testing the chatbot as a solo user. The app provides users with an emergency number and directs them to the nearest ER if they talk about self-harm. The assistant will also refute certain topics and answers. If you ask her to show you the latest sports scores or count to 1,000, Robin will tell you that she can’t do these things for you, but that she can help you with personal matters.
The company has raised $5.5 million in seed funding led by M13 with participation from Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen, early Canva investor Bill Tai, former Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman, and X.ai co-founder Christian Szegedy. At the beginning of this year, the startup had three team members and has now grown to 10.
Rasmussen said he invested in the app because he was impressed by its emotional memory system and was drawn to Xiao’s mission to help people.
“We are facing a massive disconnection problem. People are surrounded by technology but feel less understood than ever before. Robin is tackling that problem head on. It’s not about therapy or replacing relationships. It’s about strengthening someone’s ability to connect, first with themselves and then with others,” he told TechCrunch in an email.
A big challenge for Robyn is keeping users safe and ensuring they don’t anthropomorphize the chatbot.
Latif Parecha, a partner at M13, said Robin’s ultimate goal is to foster relationships, but AIs working in this space need guardrails.
“In situations where people are truly at risk, we need to put guardrails in place for escalation, especially as AI will become as much a part of our lives as our family and friends,” Parecha told TechCrunch over the phone.
The startup has been testing Robyn with a limited number of users for several months and released it in the US today. This app is paid, with a subscription costing $19.99 per month or $199 per year.
