Adding Open-Ended Conversations to Your Products (www.emotionmachine.ai)

Teams adding open-ended conversational companions to products are being warned: this isn’t a drop-in feature but a fundamental shift in user experience. The piece lays out a simple spectrum — no conversation, task-oriented bots (slot-filling, goal-bounded), and full companions (open-ended, with identity, memory, tone and proactive behavior) — and argues that choosing the companion model rewires how users perceive your product. Conversations become the dominant surface, users switch into a person-to-person mode, and they instantly judge tone, timing, recall and emotional nuance. Failures in this mode are visceral, opaque, and can drive churn for reasons that aren’t obvious (expectation mismatch, tone issues, memory lapses, safety refusals, or real utility problems). For builders this has concrete design and engineering implications: the unit of value shifts from screens and flows to exchanges, conversational design becomes central, and conventional wireframe-first processes break down. Technically you must think about identity, long-term memory, proactive behaviors, and finely tuned tone and safety policies — plus observability and instrumentation to diagnose why interactions fail. The result: incremental tweaks often won’t suffice; you may need wholesale experience redesigns. The authors promise practical guidance in Part Two and invite teams to explore companion-building tools and consultations.