03 — Collaboration with Mental Foundation
Companion Experience
Companion Experience explores what an AI companion looks like when it is built for ordinary days: talking things through, a game of chess at an hour when no one else is awake, and staying close to family.
The work
Companionship in the shape of a life
The project starts from how a day actually goes rather than from what software can do. In practice, that looks like the unremarkable hours being filled well: a message in the morning and conversation through the day, a round of 20 Questions when there's time to pass, a nudge to keep a schedule straight, encouragement to get a workout in.
It also looks like staying in the social world a person already has. The companion can help someone keep their social media current, so friends and family at a distance stay part of daily life rather than catching up months later.
The companion — Bob, in the video below — is an AI persona, built to be good company. It runs locally on a person's own device wherever the work allows it, so the texture of someone's daily life stays in their own home.
This is companionship, entertainment, and practical daily support. It works alongside the human support a person already has; it does not replace it, and it is not treatment or monitoring. We make no claims about health or clinical outcomes, and we won't describe it as anything else.
Video
A closer look
Family
Connection, with the person's consent
Companionship works best when it keeps people connected to the family they already have. Messages can be shared with a person's family members, so relatives can join in the everyday exchanges — not watching from a distance, but taking part.
That involvement follows the person's consent. Family participation is something the person at the center chooses and sets — not a default, and not a condition of using the companion.
Collaboration
With Mental Foundation
The Institute collaborates with Mental Foundation, a California nonprofit that assists families of adults with disabilities, on this companion work — connection and everyday companionship are at the heart of its mission. The formal relationship between the two organizations is not finalized, and Life Stories Institute does not operate as a DBA of Mental Foundation. We describe our organizational status as it stands.
Companion Experience runs under the same commitments as the rest of our work: people own their material, can take it elsewhere, and their conversations are not used to train models.
Related initiatives
Commercial product
Reflections
A storytelling product that helps people capture and organize personal and family stories, so a life's record holds together instead of scattering across drawers, drives, and memory.
Community project
After Pride
A community project led with Demetrius A. Bady that serves LGBTQIA+ people 50 and older, preserving lived experience and making storytelling accessible to those whose histories are least often recorded.