Twelve years ago today, Eugenia Kuida took to the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to unveil a conversational chatbot called IO that acts as a lifestyle concierge, helping people book restaurants and vacations, among other tasks.
Her startup Luka’s first product, IO, came before the deep learning breakthroughs that would eventually lead to today’s large-scale language models. “It still worked,” Kuida told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. “It was so magical…but of course it’s a far cry from what we have today.”
Luka is now Replika, a popular AI chatbot companion company. Last year, Kuida stepped down as CEO of Replika and founded Wabi. Last year, Kuida stepped down as CEO of Replika and founded Wabi.
The technology finally caught up with her original vision for Luca. Just in time for Wabi to embark on a wave of new personal AI assistants like Muse and Instinct. These assistants promise to do everything from managing your inbox to finding the best flight tickets.
On Monday, Kuyda officially released Wabi, a multiplayer personal AI assistant that acts as a messenger app, to all users. This allows users to maintain multiple agent threads specialized for different tasks and long-term goals. Within each thread, users can build and use custom apps, such as a weight loss tracker in a health thread or an app that shows nearby children’s events in a family thread.
Although Kuida describes it as more of an evolution, this launch marks a pivot of sorts for Wabi. When TechCrunch covered Wabi’s initial launch and $20 million pre-seed round last year, it was described as something like a social platform where you can create mini-apps with prompts that can be shared with friends or across the app.
Kuida said the team has realized over the past year that while people love personal software over “one-size-fits-all solutions in the App Store,” they “maybe don’t want to spend a lot of time, or ever, building it.”
In Wabi 2.0, agents decide which apps to build. When you connect it to email, it automatically launches a number of threads and apps, and users can add to it by requesting a custom app or starting a new thread.
“We do the same thing as Instinct and Muse, but we also have all of those apps to help users do more,” Kuyda said.
Building apps isn’t Wabi’s only differentiator. Kuyda is also betting on a multi-threaded, multi-player design.
“It’s not all in one thread like Instinct or Muse. It’s buried in the information coming in every day,” Kuyda says. “If you think about it, the single-threaded experience gets worse over time because you just have so much context in one endless conversation.”
According to interviews with AI researchers, the longer an AI chatbot speaks, the more likely it is to hallucinate, lose context, or react in a way that is blocked by safety guardrails.
You can also share threads to act as a group chat.
“Right now, agent apps are all just conversations between users and agents, and we feel like there should be more focus on bringing people together in group chats,” Kuida says. “You’re not doing it separately with the AI, I’m doing it separately with the AI…I don’t think anyone has cracked multiplayer yet.”
Kuida shared some of her own shared threads with TechCrunch. In One with Your Boyfriend, a row of apps along the top help you connect and find things to do together, including a live music tracker, an app that asks daily questions about your relationship, a list of restaurant recommendations, important events on a shared calendar, and a list of books you’re reading together and suggestions for what to read next.
Her more family-focused threads include an app to track her daughter’s schedule, an app to find nearby children’s events, and an app to quiz her daughter on Japanese.
Within a shared chat, users can share as much as they want, from email and calendar information to bank account details.
“So my partner can ask Wabi in the chat, ‘Is Eugenia free next Thursday?'” “Did she buy that ticket?” Kuida said. She pointed out that the scope of access is limited to individual chats, and everyone participating in the chat can see when someone’s personal information is requested.
When it comes to broader privacy, Wabi is SOC 2 compliant, meaning its data security controls have been independently audited. Kuida said Wabi runs entirely in the cloud, with most user data stored in the United States.
“My previous company, Replika, was working on developing AI to reduce people’s feelings of loneliness,” Kuida said. “To some degree, that’s true for Wabi as well. AI can bring people together, even if it just helps them spend better time together in real life, like going to a concert together or finding the next book to read together.”
Wabi is free for now, but the company hasn’t decided on a business model yet. Kuida said Wabi was in talks to raise more funds.
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