Emotional Support Bots

Five years ago quacking Aflac-like stuffed ducks were the thing at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), designed to comfort children with cancer. And while they could emote through lights and gestures, they were not able to interact verbally of course. Two years ago at CES the Moflin was announced, looking more like a Star Trek Tribble that makes sounds and wiggling movements. Comments on its Kickstarter site that it is supposed to complete shipping in July 2023 to backers who ponied up almost a half million $ in funds, so maybe this becomes the next thing soon.

Image: Bing Image Creator

These were both interesting advancements of plain old stuffed animals and security blankets, but as someone who has traveled a lot, with Inflection AI’s recent announcement of their personal AI Pi (short for Personal Intelligence), I started thinking about how this advancing AI technology could be incorporated into a physical form to act as a traveling Emotional Support Bot (ESB - just made that up).

Look, I’m not anti-cat, dog or horse (Yeah, you gotta check that link out. An emotional support horse…. on a plane…. This was before the TSA decided to step in, inject some sanity and state that Emotional Support Animals (ESA) weren’t a protected class like Service Animals, limiting the ability to bring one’s peacock, monkey, squirrel or pot-bellied pig on board). But wouldn’t it be so much easier to just carry around a cute little ESB with AI built in, fully tailored with gyroscopes, maybe a little scent dispenser, and in-flight Wi-Fi to track weather, airspeed and more (though it would need offline abilities as well) to provide calming assurance during take-offs, landings, in-flight turbulence and claustrophobia? You know, the things that cause the most pteromerhanophobia?

While just having the digital component seems to be at a good starting point for some, I would think the physical nature of the device might serve up nearly as much comfort as the voice feedback functionality. So having the tactile integrated with the vocal versus just having an AI app on one’s phone would likely be more successful at calming passengers that needed it (Think “Her” inside an Elmo). The other upsides to having an ESB is not having to file to get an ESA Letter for flying or sharing the airplane lavatory with animals.

Apparently, aside from Pi there are already a number of mental health chatbots out there that are more dedicated to this specific topic, so the concept in its components isn’t new. Replika could certainly fall into this category as well depending upon how the user interacts with it. Additionally, everyone is claiming to be an AI Personal Assistant and most of these have physical presence devices, but they aren’t focused on addressing the specific emotional component.

Anyway, I love to fly and have no need then or at other times for such an ESB, but it did get me to thinking that with generative AI and topic-focused AI this would be a great use case on the timeline to General AI that will handle all our needs. I’m just excited to see where things go in the next couple of hours weeks and months in this extremely fast-moving field.

What do you think? Leave a note in the comment section and let’s start a conversation.