Harold just got a little smarter 🧠
Last Friday, Harold is got a big update. In fact, it's the biggest/coolest update to Harold since he was born last April.
Why is it so big and so cool?
Well, it's BIG because it makes the Harold experience more enjoyable, engaging, and interesting. And I think if Harold can be those things, users will track longer, and if they track longer, they will be more successful in reaching their goals 🌟 (and that's my ultimate goal).
It's COOL because it involves a new and very exciting technology that just became widely available in recent years—GPT-3, an AI system by OpenAI that produces natural language.
Okay, sounds cool, but what does that mean?
Harold uses this technology to understand your responses and generate an appropriate response. If you did the habit, Harold might say something congratulatory. If you didn't, he might say something encouraging. But it's all generated by an AI, so you never know what you're going to get.
What does this mean for you?
- More interesting and engaging conversation. No more "Got it" or "Gotcha" after every message.
- Feels more like talking to a real person
- Congratulatory and encouraging messages can help you improve your tracking and success rate
This feature went live Friday, Sept 17 at 11:00am MDT.
How this "Harold AI" works
- Every time you respond to Harold, your response is sent to an AI. The AI reads the message and returns a response that is then sent on to you.
- I've trained this Harold AI to be encouraging but not pushy. Inspiring but not fantastical. Positive but not naive. And concise, but not boring. I've also trained him to have a sense of humor. He finds joy in the ups and downs of building habits, will find the glass-of-anything half-full and is obsessed with progress.
- Although Harold is meant to be funny, he never puts anyone down or makes you feel less. And he doesn't engage in politics or NSFW topics and language.
Why did I build this feature?
My biggest priority right now is Growth. And because I don't want to pay for ads, I need to generate more word-of-mouth growth. I need more people talking about Harold and telling their friends about him.
My hypothesis is: If I make the interaction more interesting and funny, I will increase the chance that a user tells a friend about Harold.
Some other reasons why this made sense to build now:
- Users like that the experience "feels like talking to a human". I want to lean into that.
- I recently got access to OpenAI's GPT-3 technology and I've always wanted to experiment with it
What's next:
- Harold is getting new branding! You can peep the logo here: https://twitter.com/bagelsangranola/status/1435752582266322945?s=20
- Will be slowly updating the branding across the experience, the website/landing page is going to get a big overhaul— will share when it's done!
- Growth, growth, growth.
- I'm taking Mark Tan's Community Building course to learn how to build a closer community of Harolders that can help each other grow and help improve the product in the process.
- Harold will be moving to a free trial instead of a free plan
My ask for you:
- It's still early for this feature! The AI feature is functioning and a pretty good experience, but sometimes Harold says the wrong thing. He needs to get better over time and I need your help to do that.
- Join this Discord channel to get involved.
- We'll share AI responses that we like, didn't like, ones that were funny or ones that were a little off. Together we can collectively improve the Harold AI. In return, I'm happy to jump on a call anytime to chat and answer any questions you have—about how I built Harold, how the AI works, what habits I'm working on, anything!
Hope to see you in the Discord!
Thanks for reading,
💜 Kyleigh
