Twintual, a virtual twin for managing your messages

Messages on our mobile phones, work emails to reply to, and conversations on messaging platforms yet to be read and replied to are all piling up. Tools designed to make managing our personal and work lives easier are instead leading to information overload and stress.

To solve this, engineer and student on the Master's Degree in Data Science at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) Cristina Grau Vílchez has developed Twintual, a virtual twin that replicates the user's behaviour online and helps them manage their communications.

"We want to redefine the way we communicate digitally," said Grau, stressing that "Twintual helps you manage your digital life easily and securely."

The app can be downloaded to any device and, depending on the degree of autonomy you give it, can reply on your behalf, schedule meetings, create summaries and keep you updated on what you have missed and what it has handled while you were unavailable or dealing with something else.

"You'll be able to create several profiles, such as a personal one and one for work, and connect them to all the channels you use, including WhatsApp, Slack, Instagram, email, Teams or LinkedIn. Twintual will learn from your behaviour, from the way you talk to each person, because the way we talk is not the same for our mother, our best friend or a colleague. As it learns, it will start to communicate on your behalf in a humanized way," said Grau about how the app works. The project won the jury prize at the 2024 edition of SpinUOC, the UOC's annual entrepreneurship programme.

"We want to become the most powerful digital communications app in the world," she said.

Cristina Grau presenting Twintual at SpinUOC on 27 June

Improving people's lives

Grau has developed a conversational machine learning algorithm powered by artificial intelligence and a large language model (LLM), which forms the basis of technologies such as the popular AI application ChatGPT. However, unlike these existing tools, where the type of language is very neutral and cold, the algorithm used in Twintual is fed with the way we communicate with each person and uses a more humanized language in its responses.

As she explained, the main reason that led her to develop Twintual was that she "wanted to improve people's quality of life by reducing their stress, one of the greatest diseases of the 21st century."

In fact, the starting point was her own personal experience. While she was finishing her bachelor's degree in electronic engineering and robotics in Barcelona, she had the opportunity to do her final project at Harvard University. It was then that she found that "many professional opportunities that allowed me to meet interesting people were arising, but they left me with no time for anything else".

Friends and family wrote to her to see how she was; she received work messages to hold meetings or participate in a project; she had to carry out lengthy university procedures... and, in the end, she ended up taking several days to respond to all these messages. "I realized that having to manage my daily work and studies was already stressful enough without having to add this overload of messages. That's when I came up with the idea of creating Twintual," she said.

What does it do?

Twintual's features range from managing your diary, including combining personal and professional calendars, and concluding meetings to summarizing conversations on any channel, such as the WhatsApp groups of families at your children's school, where it can often be difficult to read and respond to everything. "Your Twintual gives you a summary highlighting the salient points and tells you who has interacted the most and the main agreements reached; it notifies you if you have important emails on medical issues or creates a record of the key issues that you have to address at a client meeting," said Grau. She stressed that it all depends on the degree of autonomy you want to give your digital twin, because the user always remains in control.

Messages sent by Twintual are clearly identified so that the recipient can always know who is writing to them. Another distinguishing feature of this AI is that it only responds with what it knows and, when it cannot answer a question, it either forwards it to the user or asks for the necessary information to answer it by sending the user a notification.

For the moment, the business idea has already been validated in a study of 300 people. The app is expected to be ready for user testing by the end of the year, so that it can then be presented and launched on the market coinciding with the Mobile World Congress, in early 2025. Potential customers, such as a hotel chain that has to manage a great many reservations, have already shown an interest. "If every operator or PR person could have a Twintual, performance would increase. It's a boost to productivity that aims to help people, not replace them," said Grau.

This entrepreneurial project contributes to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure.

UOC R&I

The UOC's research and innovation (R&I) is helping overcome pressing challenges faced by global societies in the 21st century by studying interactions between technology and human & social sciences with a specific focus on the network society, e-learning and e-health.

Over 500 researchers and more than 50 research groups work in the UOC's seven faculties, its eLearning Research programme and its two research centres: the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) and the eHealth Center (eHC).

The university also develops online learning innovations at its eLearning Innovation Center (eLinC), as well as UOC community entrepreneurship and knowledge transfer via the Hubbik platform.

Open knowledge and the goals of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development serve as strategic pillars for the UOC's teaching, research and innovation. More information: research.uoc.edu.