Oli Lipski
One year after the launch of its AI-powered messaging app for Android, Mei is back with an iPhone app aimed at making it easier to see the true intentions of someone you’re messaging. Mei: Crush Analyzer for iOS, (a portmanteau of ‘messaging improved’) uses artificial intelligence to analyze conversational data to digitally enhance relationships.
While the Android app was originally used to decipher general personality compatibility with your contacts, the iOS “Crush Analyzer” version is specifically designed for romantic purposes, offering you a probability of whether the contact is interested in you.
How does it work?
One conversation analysis costs 100 credits, which can be bought via an in-app purchase for $8.99. As Apple restricts third-parties from accessing SMS and MMS (including iMessage), the iOS version can only currently analyze exported Whatsapp conversations.
On the Android version, you can analyze personalities and compatibility across all messengers, and even use Mei as the default messaging app, with added AI communication advice in real time.
There are plans to add these features to the iOS app, but this, at least in part relies on Apple. Mei founder, Es Lee, hopes it could be used as an add-on for dating apps to improve the matching process.
To analyze your conversations, you need a minimum of 1,000 words, but the company says it has plans to reduce this requirement – even if this makes the AI’s analysis less confident.
Data concerns
Thought Mei says it won’t sell the data, it offers rewards, such as credits, to those who would like to share their data with the app. This is to help develop the AI and refine its algorithms.
With consistent data concerns, especially when it comes to sensitive information found in the likes of dating apps, Mei reassures its customers that any data you upload to the app is encrypted and anonymized, can be wiped completely from the platform, and asks for consent prior to uploading.
This, however, doesn’t touch upon the data privacy of the un-consenting parties, the ‘crushers’ if you will, to have their personalities and romantic intentions analyzed.
Does it breach a level of trust when getting to know someone? Does it detract from the point of flirting? Are we cheating our way to love? Will we become reliant on it’s analysis, unable to read people without it?
Or will the AI actually teach us something about ourselves, and how we can become better people? That sounds, perhaps, a touch optimistic.
Lee says that “communicating through text can often result in confusion and misinterpretation. We think AI and machine learning can help reduce this.”
Nonetheless, other ‘Flirt Tech’ seems to be promoting a similar idea. Keigo analyzes personality types and helps you communicate better in certain situations, whether that be in an interview, on a date, or with a spouse. Juicebox texts you professional intimacy advice, and its subsidiary app, Slutbot, uses AI to train your sexting techniques.
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