As founder and CEO of healthy grocery delivery service Hungryroot, Ben McKean has been investigating the ability of AI technologies to enhance his business. But with the launch of his recent side project — an app called Every — McKean desires to explore the usage of AI to assist people establish deeper relationships with themselves and others and to seek out common ground.

Currently structured as a non-profit, Every’s iOS app leverages AI technologies to create “thought-provoking games” geared toward self-discovery.

For instance, all users begin with a game called “Inner Odyssey” that challenges you to select a photograph that best represents the place you’d wish to explore, from options like a cobblestoned city street, a natural landscape featuring a river and trees, a fantastical castle, or a distant island. You’re then asked follow-up questions like who would you travel with, what role would you play, what advice to your trip resonates with you best, and so forth.

As you play, the app shows you the way others reply to the identical query, and whenever you finish you’re prompted to see who amongst your connections — that’s, your uploaded contact list — also answered similarly.

McKean says the concept to create an app focused on human connection was an concept that’s been brewing for a while — particularly after the Covid pandemic led to a world where everyone felt more disconnected than ever.

“There’s a really large number of people that feel disconnected from even people very near them,” he explains. “58% of Americans report feeling like nobody of their life knows them well, which was only a shocking stat. And 70% of Americans feel that distrust is hurting American society,” McKean notes, citing various stats on the loneliness epidemic and connection.

As well as, McKean says he also feels impacted by these issues through his own entrepreneurial experiences leading teams and finding how difficult it could be to form connections at work. In actual fact, McKean foresees the potential to tweak Every’s model to be used within the workplace to assist colleagues bond, but with fewer personal questions.

Despite the app’s concentrate on human connectivity, it could be a surprise, then, to learn that Every’s games were created using AI — specifically, by training large language models and leveraging technology from OpenAI and Midjourney. Along with scratching his own itch, so to talk, McKean said this process helped him to develop his AI skills, which could impact his primary business at Hungryroot, which is a heavily AI-driven company.

All of the games within the app are inspired by a subject or an individual, which is the initial input for the AI.

For the latter, the corporate is partnering with inspirational leaders for a number of the topics, like Hector Guadalupe, founding father of A Second U Foundation, which helps people develop skills to achieve success in life after serving time in prison. The subject or the person is used to set the context for the generative AI. Then the team uses a structured format for the games they built into the prompts to create the questions. (Guadalupe’s AI-inspired game will release on Oct. twenty fifth).

The AI’s output should need some human intervention because the team has only been training their models for six months, McKean notes, but essentially, the AI creates the games of their entirety. The pictures that accompany the sport’s questions are then created using Midjourney.

The plan is to release one recent game day-after-day — hence the app’s name — with every day of the week having a specific theme. For instance, Monday’s games could also be focused on careers, while Friday’s games could also be about fun, Saturday’s games could also be about family connections, and Sunday’s are about spirituality or philosophy. McKean says Every also intends the games to be tailored to timely events. So within the case of the upcoming presidential elections, you may see a game tied to politics, for instance.

After playing the games, the app offers inspirational content to explore based in your responses, like videos that highlight particular topics — like pursuing your dreams or the importance of creativity.

One other tab within the app, “Map,” uses AI to generate a map of your traits based on the points you earn while playing Every’s games. After trying out the primary game, the map informed me my top traits included things like reason and happiness in the best things, which I don’t think I’d dispute. It’s also possible to thumbs up and thumbs down its findings in the event you agree or disagree to enhance its evaluation.

The thought is that, by playing these games, you aren’t only developing more self-awareness, you’re also learning the way you share common ground with other people , which could lead on you to deepen those relationships. As an illustration, you may find an old friend also enjoys international travel or your colleague prioritizes humility within the workplace. As you learn from the insights the app shares, it’s possible you’ll be inspired to take further motion, like engaging in conversations about your discoveries.

“Numerous the mission around that is about facilitating reference to people — one to 1 connection — nevertheless it’s also about helping to surface common ground slightly more holistically,” McKean says. “And so a part of the assumption is that in the event you present the identical game to each person, you’re in a position to actually find common ground between two individuals who could be very different people.”

Image Credits: Every screenshot

Every was self-funded by McKean and is run by two women, Sarah McKean (Ben’s cousin) and Maya Valliath, while app development was handled through an outsourced firm. The plan for now could be to run Every as a free app and side project. But when it takes off, McKean is leaving the door open to scale it as more of a business, potentially with investor backing.

The app has been running in beta since March, but today launched publicly on the App Store. It’s available as a free download with no in-app purchases.