A companion you talk to, not type at
AnimaEcho stands full screen on your phone. Hold the mic, speak, and she answers out loud with lipsync and head tracking. It runs speech to speech rather than text to speech over a chat log, which is why the pauses land in the right places. Free on the App Store, iPhone and iPad.
[ What it is ]- Role
- Founder, Product Designer and iOS Engineer
- Timeline
- Concept to App Store, then v1.2
- Scope
- Product design, iOS engineering, Live2D and animation, Realtime audio, Brand
The challenge
A chat window is the wrong shape for a conversation
Companion apps almost all ship as a messaging thread with an avatar bolted on top. That framing decides everything after it: you compose, you send, you wait, you read. It is correspondence, not company. The interesting question was what the app looks like if you refuse the thread from the start.
What I did
One screen, one person, and nothing else on it
The whole app is a room with her in it. No tab bar, no navigation, no message history in your face. You hold to talk and let go, and she answers in audio. Version 1.2 rebuilt the interface around that single idea, added a male companion with his own voice and pronouns, and added check ins she sends in her own words, never during the hours you told her you are asleep.
Behind a single icon there is a journal: your streak, your minutes, conversations you can pick back up, and a page called what she remembers. It lists every fact she has pulled out of your conversations, and you can delete any line of it.
