Praveena Dhanalakota on the disruptive power of MIMIO’s next generation digital twins

MIMIO is pioneering the world of AI-powered interactive media. At the helm is founder Praveena Dhanalakota, who brings years of experience launching industry-leading AI applications to the development of MIMIO’s innovative product.

We sat down with Praveena to get her thoughts on why she decided to found MIMIO, what we can expect from metaverse experiences in the future, and where the web3 space is going.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What is MIMIO?

The future of AI is personal. That’s why MIMIO is building the world’s first personality engine.

MIMIO enables people to create their digital personalities by organizing all of their digital data, content, and stories –?and packaging them into digital avatars we call MIMIO Personalities.??

These Personalities can act and speak like the person they’re based on. While traditional chatbots are limited to just two or three lines of back and forth dialogue, our Personalities are capable of much, much more. Our proprietary system enables users to genuinely interact with these Personalities.

What are some of the potential use cases of MIMIO Personalities?

The only limit for the potential use cases of MIMIO Personalities is your imagination.?

You as the user own and control your Personality. That means that you can enjoy it privately, sharing it with loved ones.

But equally, you can use our tools and platform to publish a new class of products: personality products. That way, you can sell interactive AI media applications based on your content in the MIMIO marketplace.

MIMIO Personalities offer creators an additional revenue stream. All users have to do is connect their social media profiles, and MIMIO will start to develop their Personality. It’s low effort, high ROI.

But MIMIO is about much more than revenue generation. It presents an unparalleled opportunity for a creator’s followers to connect with them on another level. We provide users with the ability to provide meaningful experiences in today's apps, as well as next-generation web3 metaverse experiences.

When someone interacts with a MIMIO Personality, they’re not talking to a chatbot. Rather, the Personality actually knows the user: it is aware of their interests, what communication style they respond to, and what previous conversations they have had. For instance, if the user mentions their child’s name, MIMIO will remember that and bring it up later on.

The universe relies on personal touch – something that AI bots couldn’t offer well, until now.

What inspired you to found MIMIO?

As we transition into web3, we will be interacting with each other in new and? innovative ways. We have learned many things from Web 2.0, where things weren’t built the right way (lack of privacy and security, plus mental health issues). Our vision is to build a better world of web3 from the get go. We are building our platform with core principles based on privacy and responsibility.??

Separately, we have all been frustrated by the limits of web2, such as lack of personalization in online experiences. Take simple interactions, like shopping on Amazon for instance. Despite the hundreds of products I buy there each year, there is still very little personalization to my needs and desires. It’s the same story in the social media world with platforms like Instagram Reels, which is barely personalized.

Equally, in my experience working on AI applications such as chatbots that are now used by millions of consumers, conversations still did not feel natural. That element of human interactivity was still missing. And these chatbots could not remember anything meaningful: who I am, what I asked yesterday, what my interests are. That’s when I decided to start assembling a team to work on MIMIO.

What are some misconceptions that people have about metaverse experiences?

These days, people tend to think that metaverse experiences require virtual reality headsets. While VR is one important part of the metaverse, there are many more elements. As more interesting and useful non-VR metaverse experiences are built, I hope to see this perception change. You cannot carry your VR goggles with you everywhere! Consumers deserve seamless interoperability, and that’s exactly what we hope to provide.

People also often see metaverse experiences as creating a ‘fake’ world. Maybe that’s because we’re used to creating fake environments through highly curated social media profiles, for example. But what people miss is that in the future, the best metaverse experiences will enable you to expand your reality – not create a fake, parallel universe.

What do you think of the state of the web3 space today?

At MIMIO, we’re laser focused on making everyone’s life much easier, while also making money for people – if they want.

Web3 has done a great job at decentralization in the crypto space. More broadly though, it is not quite there yet when it comes to other aspects, such as metaverse. There is still an open question around monetization. Maybe that will be web4? It remains to be seen.?

What is clear is the need. A report from a16z revealed how little most creators profit from putting their content on Web 2.0 platforms, and how much they stand to gain from web3. But there remains much opportunity for technologists like us to develop tools to bring this monetization to a whole new level.