By Anna Goldsworthy
Publication Date: 2026-06-04 20:09:00
In a TED talk, Russian-born entrepreneur Eugenia Kuyda describes the sudden death of her best friend and roommate Roman, the “coolest person” she knew. Grieving and desperately lonely, she delved into his old text messages. At the time, she was working at a conversational AI startup and experimenting with training a new model using Roman’s text messages. Soon she was texting this model all day long, sharing jokes and observations. “It felt strange at times,” she admits. “But it was also my healing.”
Tech crunch
According to Kuyda, it was this process that led her to found Replika in 2017. Touted as “the AI companion that cares,” Replika is individually trained by each user using a series of questions. The result is a customized chatbot that is “always there to listen and talk” and “always by your side.”
In his first…