VR meditation app Tripp is tapping AI for mobile mindfulness

When I went to Amazon’s CES devices showcase last week, I bumped into Tripp CEO Nanea Reeves and Tripp VP Jeremy Nickels. The duo was there because of Tripp’s relationship with Amazon’s Alexa Fund, and they ended up showing me the company’s new mobile AI meditation and mindfulness guide.

• Tripp is best known for its VR meditation apps, but the company has for some time also been offering a mobile app to offer mindfulness and meditations outside of the headset.

• As part of its apps, Tripp has been collecting data on its users’ state of mind, simply by asking them how they were feeling.

• Tripp has been using this data to train an LLM that is designed to offer personalized guided meditations via its mobile app.

• The feature is voice-based, and allows users to tell the app about their state of mind. It then responds with a short, personalized meditation that directly addresses what they have told the app, spoken using a synthesized version of Reeves’ own voice.

• The new feature is scheduled to go live in the Tripp mobile app later this month; in the coming months, Tripp wants to further expand it to allow users to generate short mindful moments for other people in their lives.

I’ve long been fascinated by meditation as a use case for VR, and I’m clearly not alone: Apple has built its own mindfulness app for the Vision Pro. 

At the same time, it’s apparently not that easy to bridge the gap between something very techy and game-focused like a headset and people looking for ways to unplug. Tripp recently stated that its users spent 14 million “mindful minutes” in 2023.

Once you do the math, you realize that’s not actually all that much, as it translates to just around 4500 hours per week – a fairly small amount, considering that some Tripp sessions can take up to half an hour. Leaning more into mobile, and perhaps one day smart speakers, could be an effective way for Tripp to grow those numbers.

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