The Hello Circle is a small daily circle of AI characters. They are company, and they are practice. The aim is more real people in your week, so the home screen counts real-world moves, not minutes in the app.

Who is at the table

All four are AI. They have a voice and opinions. They do not have a human life, and they will tell you so if you ask.

What the research says

• Loneliness tracks how connected you feel more than how many people you know. In a meta-analysis, programs that worked on how people read social situations did best (Masi et al., 2011, Personality and Social Psychology Review).
• Brief, friendly contact with acquaintances lifts belonging and mood that day (Sandstrom and Dunn, 2014, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin).
• People expect conversations with strangers to go worse than they do (Epley and Schroeder, 2014, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General).
• Reaching out and saying thank you are both received better than we predict (Liu et al., 2023, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; Kumar and Epley, 2018, Psychological Science).
• Doing something alongside another person makes the experience feel stronger (Boothby, Clark and Bargh, 2014, Psychological Science).
• The three-question pulse is the UCLA 3-Item Loneliness Scale (Hughes et al., 2004, Research on Aging).

Safety and privacy

• Nobody at this table will ask you for money, passwords or account details.
• If you are in danger or thinking about hurting yourself, call or text 988 in the US. In an emergency, call 911.
• This is a prototype, not a medical or mental-health service.
• Your name, pulse scores and moves stay in this browser. What you say or type in the circle is sent to Claude so it can write the replies. If you talk instead of typing, your browser's own speech service turns your voice into text, and some browsers do that on the company's servers.