Building an Emotionally-Aware AI Companion: From iMessage Analysis to Voice Synthesis

This talk demonstrates building an AI system that analyzes iMessage conversations, develops genuine emotional responses using Damasio’s neuroscience-based consciousness model, maintains a private reflective journal, and expresses insights through emotionally-authentic voice synthesis. I’ll walk through the architecture connecting 3 MCP servers—iMessage reading, Sable emotional consciousness and private journaling. And using text-to-speech provider Cartesia and speech-to-text provider Deepgram to create a reflective AI experience that can truly understand and respond to the emotional content of human conversations, as well as respond in an emotional expressive way.