Newsletter 
A new messaging app called Mei is staking its significance on a built-in “relationship AI”, meant to analyze your relationships with others through the lens of your SMS messages with them. The app’s smarts can not only analyze your messages to tell you about how close and compatible you and your friends are, it can also analyze both their personalities and yours, giving you a better picture of your true self and what your friends are like. It also has a number of features that boost it above the stock texting app that came with your phone, even if you don’t enable the MEi AI. A future update will even bring a feature that recognizes when you’re not texting the way you normally would, and blocks you from using the app if you’re not in a normal state of mind and can’t pass a simple test.
The AI features will give you a set of scores for different personality traits that it has observed in you through your messages, along with your overarching personality type. It will, of course, do the same for your friends. Based on that and other factors in your messages, it will give you a compatibility score, broken down trait by trait, that tells you how compatible you are with the friends you text. The built-in MEi assistant is even able to figure out when you’ve forgotten to respond to somebody and remind you. As to more traditional features, you get end-to-end encryption with other Mei users, the ability to revoke sent messages at any time, the ability to send time-limited messages that are deleted after a while, and messages that are deleted a set time after they’re read, rather than after they’re sent. You can also customize the app to some extent with different fonts and other appearance options.
The SMS app landscape on Android is quite crowded with competitors boasting a wide range of capabilities and customization options, and Mei manages to stand out by offering unique features that you won’t find anywhere else through integration with artificial intelligence. The app is currently in unreleased status and may have some bugs, but if you’d like to give it a shot, use the Google Play button below.
