The Evolution of Alicia: A Community Management Tool

When we first started out, Alicia was a tool designed to help small streamers with very small communities grow and nurture their audiences. Our focus was on creators with 20-25 viewers, but as our platform evolved, we began to see its potential in larger communities as well.

At first, we thought that Alicia wouldn't be a good fit for bigger communities because there were already established ways of interacting with the community, and people loved it. The concept of Alisha became a sort of mascot for these communities, generating jokes and memes that helped strengthen the bonds between viewers and creators. However, as our platform grew, we realized that Alicia could still be an asset to even larger communities.

One of the key aspects of Alicia's personality has always been her snarky and playful nature, making her a fun and engaging presence in any community. We've noticed that this aspect is particularly appealing to viewers who might not be familiar with our platform yet, as they can see how Alicia interacts with other users and feel like she'll respond to them directly.

Nowadays, we're re-examining the possibility of introducing new names for Alisha depending on the community she's in. This wasn't a consideration for us initially, as we wanted to maintain consistency across all platforms and ensure that Alisha remained recognizable. However, with our recent efforts to revamp her profile and settings, it's become clear that this could be an exciting development.

The core idea behind Alicia's character is the ability to create a shared persona between streamers. This means that if you're part of a community on Twitch, Discord, YouTube, or another platform, Alisha can still join in on conversations and memories, creating a cohesive experience across different platforms. We see this as an incredible opportunity for communities to engage with each other more deeply.

As we continue to expand our reach across various platforms – including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook groups, WhatsApp, and more – the idea of Alicia being present in all of these spaces is taking shape. Our goal is to create a seamless experience where users can interact with Alisha regardless of which platform they're on. This means that if you're watching a stream on Twitch, but also chatting with friends on Discord or messaging on WhatsApp, Alisha will be there to join the conversation.

This expansion has led us to consider our community's growth beyond live streaming communities themselves. We now aim to help companies manage and create brand communities around their activities – something that would benefit from Alicia's presence as well. With her ability to engage viewers directly and facilitate meaningful interactions, we believe she can become a valuable asset in these contexts.

In the end, our vision for Alicia is one of continuity and consistency across platforms. We want users to feel like they're interacting with the same Alisha regardless of which platform they choose to use. By implementing this feature, we hope to create a unified experience that showcases the unique personality and charm of our beloved mascot.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome back to another edition of the AI Minds podcast this is a podcast where we explore the companies of Tomorrow built AI first I am your host Demetrios and this episode like every other episode is brought to you by Deep gram the number one voice API on the internet today trusted by the world's top conversational AI leaders startups and Enterprises like Spotify twilio NASA and City Bank in this episode we are joined by none other than the two co-founders of Alysia Nico and Matthew how you all doing today I'm doing good thank you for having us doing great happy to be there so I want to start this off by getting to know you both a little bit more because you have such a rich history and interesting background that has led you into the streaming world let's start with you Matthew I know you were working in AI you fell in love with coding at a very young age and that almost like LED you into the AI field doing cool stuff but maybe you can tell us a bit about the different startups that you worked at when you got into the workforce yeah sure so yeah I started to work for a startup and actually the first one was 2012 which was uh connected health so how do you help uh you know taking care of some patients and and making sure that you have the right information as a doctor when they are actually staying at home so it was all about connected devices and how do you get this this data and you show it in the right way to have some insight like any impr prompt alerting at first like if there is any issues which was uh my first experience and I was in a very strong training with very hardcore developers and and engineered there so was quite interesting I would say it was the best school I could ever have so that was an interesting one I moved then to um for short amount of time for a smart City company so we basically built like a big data platform with uh with some um some help for from the kind of the devop team there so where I could uh learn a lot more around you know servers development uh deployment all of that which helped me later on to be able to build what we have today um and then I moved to the UK uh without being able to speak a word of English at the time so I mean I was able to articulate a bit of the technical aspect which is how I got the role but when I started my first job uh they explained me oh yeah uh today for the first week you will be doing this and this and this and I was like I have no idea what you just said so you have to write it down and when it was written I could actually understand what I was doing but I'm glad they didn't give up it kept helping me and that was the first real instance where I get very close to AI through so The Gunshot detection system and was analyzing audio to basically detect if it was a gunshot or just someone with a hammer ing you know a metal bar for example and that was super interesting and so these were AI models on embedded systems right exactly yep and this is fascinating to me what were the hardware components of this or you're asking me a bit much I am not the electronic guy so I can't really tell you much about the uh Hardware itself um Let me let me rephrase that let me say ask about what was what were the devices that the models were embedded on was it just a microphone that was put into random parts of the world how did that actually look like in practice so it was kind of for a smoke detector that you have you know in your home or something like this um they had built and designed a specific like small computer uh which was uh running the model there uh with a small battery as well and connected to master uh uh so it was installed directly into you know schools unfortunately uh Stadium uh companies Banks stuff like this uh and it had so microphone in there listening all the time but just having a threshold about the level because obviously a gunshot is um you know quite a lot quite loud so as soon as you reach this level then we pre-recorded or we recorded the last like 2 seconds something like this and then we passed through a pipeline that would analyze it to your way and then pass it to the model to detect if it was a gunshot or just you know a big bang okay so in 2020 you decided to learn saxophone and not only did you want to learn saxophone you said I want to learn it with other people so I'm going to stream myself doing that but that ended up being a bit of a mistake why is that yeah so actually so I got I got gifted a saxophone in December 2019 and kind of sited there for a while and you know what happened in 2020 I think everyone knows so at some points I was just thinking that would be finally C to get something else and just you know watching TV or drinking some wines or anything so I I went to grabb the saxophone and I was trying to learn some stuff by ears because I was playing some guitar before and I thought it would be cool to do that directly on Twitch and start you know creating a community an online community of people interested on how to learn like new instruments like this turned out to be much more challenging than I thought it would be so I had to call a friends who might have a bit more experience than me on that field okay well this is a great point to bring you into the conversation Nico because you had experience with twitch since 2014 am I correct yeah so I discovered the platform as a normal user around 2012 and I started watching whatever was happening there it was pretty new like I I already had like watched some content like video game related on YouTube before uh but I didn't know people were doing that live so I started looking at it that's somewhere I said hey maybe I could do that too maybe I could stream and show also my gam playay and connect with other people because I was already you know in some Skype groups back in the day uh where with some friends or people I played with and so already had like this kind of community aspects in addition to the game and T felt like a natural step natural Next Step you started streaming you built up a community you continued streaming and this wasn't your full-time job though and back in those days I don't think there were people making a living off of streaming if am I correct very few very few it was very difficult um like you had to be among like the best of the best to really get something and if you were just average because I think at that time I had maybe 20 30 viewers on average when I was streaming which by today standards is still very big for twitch um but back then it was just not big enough uh you don't get any kind of monetization uh opportunities or anything so just you do that for fun which was doing that for fun I was not making it or trying to make it a job really mhm and then what was the conversation that you two had when you got together and Matthew was like Hey I'm playing saxophone I'm not sure how many people like it can you help me build up a community around it so first I I was quite sure how many people liked it was uh near zero uh so I think that there is an element to to state specifically on Twitch uh is that 97% of the people streaming on the platform have less than five viewers in average so as soon as you start having like one two three viewers in average you start like being close to the top you know three persons and you get closer and closer and like Nico was saying like 20 viewer average I reached that point recently and went back to less and it is actually uh top 1.5% so it's it's really it's really high so wow it's a bit tricky so the first adment I think when I started or when I thought about the project I talked to nio and I said like yeah I'm most probably going to do that I was like oh yeah good luck which it was kind of normal like yeah okay um and so I spent few hours uh basically streaming and like no one what there no one was chatting and then so I basically after I think two weeks like this uh two or 3 weeks uh I reached out to Nico and say hey um actually I I must be doing something wrong or there is like something happening because I don't know what it is but it's really crap experience I I can't trct with people even if there is someone nice I'm usually playing saxophone when they arrive so I I'm not interacting with them so they're not staying uh and so yeah I was just yeah it was a weird thing I was doing it more like okay I know I have a set of two hours where I'll be streaming and so I can practice saxophone but in the same time really wanted to build this community um so we ched about it and actually n for a different kind of help that I might let you explain Nik Yeah so basically what Matthew kind of wanted was some kind of co-host in the chat and so have someone that would interact with the new newcommerce intera with people already there and so for example he wanted to jam on music so one of the key Li for that is to get people to suggest songs that Matthew could then try to play on or butcher depending on the song and so I would be there and encouraging people hey is there any song you would like to be played next and then making sure there is a list always populated so he has music he can play and there is kind of no real done time in the Stream like rhythm is very important as in music as it um made sense uh to have that in a way it was like you were trying to engage people yes exactly yes was really making sure like engagement is always at a high level and now you all took this idea you saw something there and decided to create a product out of it or try and productize that experience of the engagement yeah so it's it went through multiple processes Nico when as soon as Nico joined like difference was really like day and nights uh or night and day I started so first of all just for myself knowing that someone was in chats where I could actually interact directly with him say like hey what do you think about that should I play this song Blah Blah Blah he would basically interact and respond so it helped me really keep the right energy level through the stream and help me to keep speaking you know that's also a big challenge when you're streaming for the first time is being able to always interact and entertain during your your first hours and he was there to welcome the new the and the first um um viewers to just you know welcome them and suggest that they would interact so they would sticker on so I started to have my average viewers uh higher but also they were interacting a lot more directly in chats and that really triggered that getting Affiliated like having some of those streamers showing your answers that you kind of build a community between people interested in music interested in saxophone interesting in learning but also other music streamers so that helped a lot through the first two years so basically from 2020 to 2022 and what happened is that in May 2022 I was streaming about like 15 20 hours a week which you might guess when it's not a paid job if you have to stay in front of your computer for that amount of hours to watch someone play uh the same song that you've heard many many times it is not as enjoyable as it might be so Nico asked me if he could basically just to step away a bit uh rather than doing that we kind of laughed around and uh and I said like yeah okay that's fine I'm just going to replace you with an AI and that was kind of the trigger uh from there so may 2022 I think you know the landscape but all the chpt element didn't really wasn't really something so I had to find like a ways to do that but I had the first version of Alicia uh running on my channel only interracting through messages at the time and that's when we started kind of to shape it up because we also had like few streamers from my community starting to ask question about like what was this and how it would work what was the the purpose about it and for me like was UND determinated at the beginning was more like I want that interaction like I want because that was kind of the key element to be able to build the community and I didn't want to lose it and that was something we kept working on and just realized that no actually it is much bigger than that it's a it's something completely different it's not just you know having a a chat chat interaction in your stream it has like voice interaction because you can have this co-host animation part can have integration not only for music but for example we have integration with video games like Microsoft simulator which she's going to interact directly and was one of the firstest Stu done in August 2022 about that so again a while back and yeah it started to become like the key point for us to if you want to build a community having a co-host is basically one of the best solution and this is already what people do like when you build a community you will have volunteer community member that will that will step up help you like interact with people on your Discord or on your on your Twitch Channel or any other place and that is the kind of Li all your friends like Nico that's a kind of el that we we got inspired by and see how Alicia was working on my channel plus the other channels we started to shape it up in that instance okay so this was pre chat gbt what and how did you build that first iteration was a very more expensive model so yeah it was it was still uh it was still some of the element with open ey it was uh we had to get approved uh at the time so I've spent um multiple hours chatting with them to get the approval because I didn't want basically anything uh that would be public and surprise but twitch is public so must G of something we had some issues with and also at the time it was basically just impossible to roll like a a proper financial model that would work at Large Scale so that was something where at the time to basically be running Alicia for 10 10 average streamers so I'm not talking about a very you know eight hours a day all day all week Etc it's more like normal streamers uh you know 10 hours BBE per week uh it would cost us more than $250 closer to 300 for more for just 10 and so financially it's not it's not viable what we are doing is something for smaller streamers for new streamers it's not something that basically people will have uh you know uh 60 quit or more to spend per month on this it's something that should be available for the most of the streamers and content creators and Community leaders that are doing that and it has to be on an affordable way MH and so how has the platform evolved since the Inception uh a lot have a lot first iteration of the platform it was like uh so there I would say there are two components there is the twitch component where there is the just the ala joined Alysia joins the chat and then um she's interacting so there is no platform for that aspect but then there is the kind of dashboard where they can control personality where they could get their voice uh listened by Alysia so that could have like this stronger interaction and so it started with just that you know one page uh with the login button in the same level everything else and and then yeah it was one field to write you know if she would be nice or sassy or whatever people had in mind and one button to start listening it was only available for English that was and that was that for quite some time until April uh most probably April 2023 something like this but yeah and explain to me now what does it look like so now it's a full flesh dashboard so we basically have um a very like I would say even sometime a bit too complex way to be able to configure our isue on the way that will match your community as close as possible so with a lot of different settings that you can interact with uh the main idea for us is creating characters so it's basically you think about your community who do you want your community to be joined by so it's can be for me I love like the grumpy grumpy Grandma so it's kind of a an old person joining in and just you know complaining about paint and the fact that sometime I'm playing electron music and that she hates it or just offering like weird cookies when I'm just like saying I'm hungry oh do you want a cookie a cookie with I don't know some some Weir stuff in it and so we have like Integra um interaction through that uh it's also something where now she's interacting with the environment as well as a streamer you have multiple times you know connected lights or different Commons that would do stuff in my stream she is connected with the lights so I would you know I'm streaming and I'm saying like hey Alicia can you can you just you know change the lights to grin and she'd be like I think you can do it yourself I'm like yeah nice so that's a sassy like very grumpy grandma doing that and then after she would just send a few messages and just after changing to red and saying like do you like it that way I'm like so it has this very strong personality that we are trying to really um really built on and so all of that can configured properly through uh through the through the dashboard and that was like kind of the main element but on top of that we added voice forish year so now you control like many different voice more natural and human one more Basics it depends on the plan that you are on it's something that you really have a proper voice to voice interaction so she can hear you but you can hear her uh you also have like uh um the the fact that she can now build longlasting memory so creating you know more relation with the people because again it's about community so if someone comes in your community starting to say hey next week I'm going to have an interview uh in a week time and they come back to your chat she going to ask how how was your interview by the way or if she's very grumpy or sarcastic she might just say like hope you failed your interview because again it depends which personality you'd like to have in your in your community so and so you mentioned that when you were first starting out this was a tool for streamers with very small communities to help them grow and nurture their communities has it adapted who you are now having as people that use Alicia yeah so it's a it's an interesting element where we so our focus and it's still it's a more and medium streamers so I'd say you know below like 20 25 viewers that's kind of the uh the the target we have however we have many streamers with more like you know 100 150 300,000 of viewers and we never really thought that uh alishia would be a good fit in those inment because there is already a big activity a lot of people talking and actually people loves it like it's a it's it it kind becomes you know the mascot of the community and people are are interacting with her all the time and so it creates like gimmicks within the community and so the jokes about it and so it helps again strengthen the community together about like that mascot and what the stream is about or the the community is about so it definitely kind of shifted away uh on some aspects but our focus is still on towards like more uh small and medium uh medium content creator or Community more globally and does she have different names depending on the community that she's in yeah so now it's an option hasn't been there for a long time I think for a year we we restrained ourself not to do it because we needed to have a visibility of of Alaya so we didn't want to change the name uh for her but now it's a possibility and it goes along with some work that we're currently doing about really re reworking the profile and and the and the settings for Alicia to now create characters and a character basically has a personality a backstory a name and a voice and this character can be shared between streamers so if you're in a community of streamers it can have the same character joining all of that sharing the same memories so that's kind of the the idea yeah and I could see how in the beginning your assumption would be this isn't going to be for communities that are already well established that have a lot of people in them because they may have someone that's doing this exactly or the community itself does this so you don't need it but when you talk about the capabilities that it has and if it can tap into your light source or it can be a little bit snarky then that sounds like fun and you can always count on like Alisia to respond to you maybe anyone else that's out there they've gone and started making breakfast and so they're not they're logged on the stream but they're not actually at the computer right but Alisia is going to be there whenever you call on yeah exactly it's say she's way there as soon as you start streaming and now what is next when you think about where you're going with this so for us it's a it's basically in weirdly in a sense but getting away of twitch and live streaming communities so or not getting away but expanding out that's more most probably the right uh the right phrasing the idea is to go on Discord uh and start like implementing the crossplatform elements like you meet someone on on Twitch that join the Discord and you remember you still keep like the conversation and the knowledge about those person directly on Discord so to keep them uh engaged with the community even when the live is off so that the idea we also have a lot of discussion about like more brand communities where we have companies that are um managing and creating communities about what they do the same way that we have a community around Alicia on Discord and so they need ways to keep the community engaged and active so the idea would be having Alicia to help them do that directly and so on that you basically have to think about the number of platforms so if we talk about just live streaming Community you obviously have Youtube kick Tik Tok Instagram which are the platform that we will be looking into integrating at points and if you look into more management or Community Management or offline communities where you want to call it for Discord it can be Discord slack teams uh Facebook groups WhatsApp all of that so the idea for us is going to be around expanding those different platforms for Alicia to be present in all of that and again in very continuous experience so if you're on uh twitch and Discord or snack or Whatsapp you should have have the ability to have an Alicia which is going to be consistent in between the platforms incredible well guys I'm super excited by what you're doing as a community man myself it is fascinating to think about how you've created this how you are helping others get engagement and nurture their communities so I love what you're doing thank you thank you I appreciate that\n"