Overview

Manifest started with a question I’d had for years: what if a journal could understand what you write and give something back? In November 2019 I built the first version, called Mirror, over a weekend at the AI LA / MIT Hacking Medicine hackathon on mental health and cancer, held at the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator in Los Angeles. I wrote the app code, working with teammates Shami, Rodrigo, Raleigh, and Kjell.

After the hackathon I kept going with it under the name Manifest, did customer interviews and market research, and started building a first version.

What I built

• A React Native app with voice-to-text, so you can talk your journal entry instead of typing it
• Natural language processing (IBM Watson and Google’s BERT) to pull sentiment and emotion out of each entry and show it back to you
• A “growth mindset” assessment, based on a lightly modified version of the standard questionnaire, as a starting point for guided journaling
• The code is open source on GitHub (about 20 stars)

What I learned

• The feature I really wanted was dynamic prompts: questions that respond to what you’ve already written. In late 2019 that was a hard technical problem.
• A few years later, large language models made it easy. I wrote about using ChatGPT that way in AI as a Journaling Companion.