Mei Announces Its Launch With A Major Expansion Of Features

Before launching, we wanted to make Mei a better texting app than the ones that are pre-installed on Android phones. It was a long road of bug fixes and improvements but after almost a year of beta testing, we’re pretty much there! We feel we’ve ironed out the major issues and introduced features like data messaging and folders/labels that make us a better option than the default SMS/MMS apps on Android. For those beta users who turn on advanced features like our AI assistant and polling, we’ve given them a taste of how AI could help improve their relationships and how polling could open them up to a network of opinions.

As we fully launch Mei, we’re introducing a set of features that will give you access to almost every type of information you could imagine.  Our latest versions (3.0.0+) include a set of features that massively expand Mei’s AI, analytics, polling and even contact management capabilities.  Now, you can get almost any insight from our AI, from the data itself and from other people. 

Starting with version 3.0.0 and above, when you tap on the Mei pulsating ball or a contact’s avatar, instead of getting a personality profile, they will see a new “fan-out” menu offering a range of new features.

User Fan-Out Menu

Contact Fan-Out Menu

User And Contact Overviews

The new “Contact Overview” and “User Overview” options will take you to a dashboard of all the intelligence, analytics and contact management that Mei has for the contact or you, respectively. Many of the new features can be accessed directly from the fan-out menus shown above, but the overview screens provide a dashboard console to almost all the new features.

Sample Contact Overview

Tags

At the top of the Overview screens is the “tags” section.  These tags can be filled when you answer some of Mei’s questions or they can be picked manually by you. Adding tags to contacts enables better contact management as well as some pretty amazing AI capabilities down the road, like auto-predicting tags.

Once a contact is tagged, either by selecting pre-set tags or creating a custom tag, each tag will also appear as a hidden label in the conversation list. Combine that with our “blast” feature, and you can start doing some pretty interesting things, like blasting your closest guy friends who live in NY with a single, targeted text, based on the tag you have created for them.

Let’s say you want to create a BBQ invite for 30 people. Simply create a “BBQ” custom tag and add it to a contact. You can tag each contact you want to invite in the “Add Tag” screen or, within the conversation list screen, create a “BBQ” label and simply drag and drop each contact into that label. Then hit “blast” and you will send an individual text to each of those 30 contacts, personalized with the name you have that person saved as in your contacts.

A side the benefit of tagging is that it allows us to improve our AI/prediction models rapidly. In the future, we may auto-predict tags based on the contents of the conversations.

Analytics And Relationship Balance

Recently, we asked our users what features they would like next and realized they really wanted tools that allowed them to make their own conclusions. Now, Mei offers a set of analytics and metrics to do exactly that. For each conversation, you will be able to see a summary of numbers and statistics, such as who texts more or who uses more emojis, as well as see how the relationship has changed over time.

You’ll even get a score rating the balance of each relationship, which factors in all the statistics we show you, plus ones like response times and conversations initiated. Mei will let you over-analyze any conversations and even put it all together into one balance score!  When the line moves over onto your side of the graph the balance of the relationship has moved into your favor.

Your Mood Tracking

When we asked users to choose from a set of features, the one that they would like us to work on next, the overwhelmingly most popular request was mood tracking. This history will now be displayed as soon as you enter the User Overview screen. Tapping on the graph will automatically load any journal entries you have submitted to Mei in the past for that date.

Ask Mei

The “Ask Mei” feature allows you to select from a pre-set list of questions to ask our AI assistant. Ever wonder what the person you met recently thinks about you romantically? For each of your contacts (that you have enough texts with), you can ask whether Mei thinks they could have a crush on you. It’s like picking rose petals, but based on science.  Mei’s AI models have been trained on hundreds of thousands of relationships where users have labeled what type of relationship it is. So now, Mei’s gotten pretty good at distinguishing if someone’s trying to flirt with you or not. You can access the “Ask Mei” function from the fan-out menu of a contact or the “Contact Overview” screen.

You’ll also be able to ask Mei which of your top contacts seems the most caring, loyal, positive or negative.  These questions can be accessed from the user’s fan-out menu (hit the pulsating ball on the “Conversations” screen) or within the “User Overview” screen.

The number of questions will be limited at first and expand over time.

Tell Me Something

Up till now, you had to wait for Mei to give you intelligence. Now, you will be able to ask Mei to “Tell Me Something” about yourself or a contact.

Polling

When data and AI aren’t enough to get you the answers that you want, you can now get access to other people through our polling platform. We’re continually making improvements to our system and recently, we made user-created polling accessible to all our users. So, if you want to crowdsource a good response to a text or settle a debate on the best Overwatch character, now we give you access to thousands of other Mei users through anonymous polling. You will be able to reward other users with the amount of credits you choose for answering your polls. With our most recent release, there is the option of free-form responses to answers and soon, the ability to target polls and select winners for the best answers.

Our launch features provide the foundation for making every piece of information that you would ever want and didn’t even know you could get – whether through AI, data or other people – becomes accessible through Mei.