This is exactly the opposite. What happens today that there is no ritual, nothing that allows us to remember and to face it. We try to avoid our feelings by trying to shove them as deep as possible as fast as possible. It doesn't help. We all need a ritual that would work in the digital age to process - this is like sitting shiva.
Not sure what you call fake. Sometimes we just need a place to say something that's important, to feel the connection. Pretending that this never happened was the first thing I did, and that didn't help. Sometimes in order to let go you have to come as close as possible.
How would you call it then? It's an app that mimics a friend that knows a lot about restaurants - I believe that can be called AI. However we used AI in the title just to make it easier to understand what we do. We sometimes just say it's a mobile app that gives you restaurant recommendations in a chat interface.
We use more than 15 different data sources - mainly user reviews (Yelp, 4Square, TripAdvisor), blogs and professional media (SF Gate, Eater etc) and guidebooks (Michelin, Zagat etc). All data is collected automatically and then plugged into our data model. We extract entities and make sentiment analysis to learn what this place is good for exactly and to show relevant quotes. As people share much more in a conversation than they would on sites like Yelp matching our users' preferences with the restaurant data makes our recommendations more relevant and personalised.
Thanks for your feedback - we're improving our restaurant data now (it's all being collected automatically). Oakland is next to come - we'll keep you updated!
SMS is going to be our next step - we started with texting in Russia actually. Our own app however let's us get a better UX for the users. Thanks for the tip!