TL;DR: AnimaEcho is an iPhone companion who listens when you speak and talks back in her own voice, in real time. I designed, engineered and shipped her solo, from the first sketch to the App Store. This is what building her taught me about voice, personality and latency as design materials.

What is AnimaEcho?

AnimaEcho is a companion who lives on your phone. Open the app and she is right there, fully animated and full of personality. Talk about your day, ask her anything, or just keep her around. She answers out loud, in her own voice, and the conversation flows naturally because there is no tap to record button and no waiting for a wall of text.

She is live on the App Store.

Why build a voice companion instead of another chatbot?

Chat interfaces put a keyboard between you and the conversation. That is fine for work, but a companion should feel present. Voice removes the keyboard, and a real time voice removes the pause that reminds you that you are talking to software. The moment responses became instant, testers stopped saying the app "answered" and started saying she "reacted". That word change was the product working.

What did designing a personality teach me?

Three things carried the experience, and none of them were features:

• Latency is a design material. A one second delay reads as thinking. Three seconds reads as broken. I treated response time the way I treat typography, as something to tune until it disappears.
• Animation is trust. A static avatar with a great voice still feels like a phone tree. Micro movements, blinking and reactions while she listens make the conversation feel mutual.
• Personality is restraint. The temptation is to make an assistant that does everything. AnimaEcho does one thing, she keeps you company, and every design decision defends that.

What does shipping an app solo actually involve?

Everything. Product strategy, interface design, the engineering, App Store assets, localization decisions for the Japanese market, and the marketing page. Being an Apple Design Award winning designer who also writes production code means there is no handoff loss anywhere in that chain. The same person who chose the shade of her hair also profiled the audio pipeline.

I applied the same end to end approach to my other app, Glimpse Vision AI, a real time assistant that sees through your camera.

FAQ

What is AnimaEcho?

An iPhone app with an animated AI companion who listens to your voice and answers back in her own voice, in real time.

Who made AnimaEcho?

Carlos Lastres, an Apple Design Award winning product designer and software engineer in Tokyo, designed and built it solo.

Where can I download it?

On the App Store.

Carlos Lastres is an Apple Design Award winning product designer and software engineer based in Tokyo, a 3x TEDx speaker and a United Nations speaker. He designs products that turn attention into revenue, and ships his own apps end to end.