Youper

Youper is an Artificial Intelligence company providing emotional assistance through a virtual chatbot service to improve emotional health. The service records moods and offers helpful ways to mitigate a poor emotional state with gratitude and mindfulness. The company created Youper to be a first responder to emotional stress many people face in their daily life. As of March 2019, the service is free as the company seeks a sustainable business model.

Youper provides its support service through an application on Android and iOS mobile operating systems. The machine learning model is created with collaboration with psychiatrists and includes approaches from mindfulness, meditation, Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). The application works as a mood tracker, gratitude journal, mindfulness trainer, personality analysis, and anxiety screening platform to provide insights into factors that affect users emotional health.

The application uses text-based chat to record responses while providing simple placeholder options for users to record their mood. The application follows through on the responses with more questions to record factors affecting the mood. Personalized responses allow it to understand the state of the user and can encourage the user to record moments of gratitude or practice mindfulness to avert their bad mood. Mindfulness feature of the app guides the user to a selection of guided meditation techniques to start mindfulness meditation session. As the amount of data builds up, it allows it to detect and monitor symptoms for the user's mental health problems.

Youper’s atlas project uses anonymized responses from participating users and presents insights through interactive visualization on its website. It uses machine learning to explore and compare different factors influencing human emotions. The visualization can be altered according to moods, country, gender, and occupation. The data representation is limited to a duration of the last 14 days. However, researchers can get in touch with the company for a large set of data.

Diego Dotta, Jose Hamilton Vargas, Thiago Marafon founded the company in 2016 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.