Persona, the platform initially built as way to make social media a more intimate way to share family memories, has pivoted during the pandemic to focus on video chat and capturing meaningful experiences from those interactions.
Persona co-founder Chad Wittman said the idea to change things up dawned on him during the coronavirus lockdown, when so many people turned to video platforms for social interactions. Seattle-based Persona is now geared toward recording conversations and using artificial intelligence to pinpoint highlights and return digital keepsakes to users.
“Pre-COVID, I don’t think enough people fully bought into this idea of using live video,” said Wittman, who previously co-founded peer-to-peer moving startup Dolly. “I was celebrating my 3-year-old’s birthday on a Zoom call with family across the country. It hit me, ‘Why are we using Zoom, an enterprise conferencing tool, for one of the most emotionally important moments in my life?'”
Wittman figured in five years we’ll require entirely different features, experiences and needs when using live video with the people that matter to us. So the time felt right to seize on it.
Persona gamifies chats by adding prompts and fun questions to the mix to get conversations going in the right direction. For example: “How do you feel about pineapple on pizza?” or “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“The most powerful thing about prompts isn’t necessarily the content. Prompts illuminate topics and discussions we often rarely would organically stumble across,” Wittman said. “When these conversations are had with people that matter to you, the conversations drift from good to great.”
The original intent of sharing memories among different generations of a family is still intact. Wittman called it a “wide-ranging space” and the platform might still be used to capture precious moments of a toddler running around or life lessons from grandparents.
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The AI-curated highlight videos are a blend of “science and art,” Wittman said, keying on things that cause laughter and smiles, for instance. They recently added “I love you” phrase detection, which is another way to compile a special video from multiple calls.
In regard to data privacy, Wittman said Persona is being set up as a benefit corporation and is legally committed to higher standards of purpose, accountability and transparency.
Wittman started Persona with Jason Norris, another Dolly co-founder, and Justin Hall, who was head of product operations at Tapcart.
Persona offers three pricing tiers — free, premium and gold — and is available in the App Store.
“Our current version is laying the foundation and exploring how people like to interact in this new type of digital space,” Wittman said. “Building a network that can bring more and more people to be creators is something special that I think fundamentally changes how we experience social going forward. It’s ambitious, but I believe it’s the future.”
