Belgium-based company Rili (pronounced really), which is an AI-powered social media platform that allows one to create digital twins, made its soft launch today in six countries, namely India, USA, Indonesia, Philippines, Brazil, and Mexico. 

“We are expecting to get the most feedback in this alpha phase. We have tested it with around 4,000 users, but need more feedback to refine the solution to get something that can work in every single market,” said Jorge Cuervo and Antonio Camacho, the co-founders of Rili, in an exclusive interview with AIM.    

Expands in India 

Talking about the soft launch in six countries alone, and India being critically chosen, Cuervo said, “We discovered, particularly in India, that you’re not a single market, you are a lot of markets in one country.” 

“[In India] the appetite for artificial intelligence solutions and the population that is beyond Gen-Z – 16 to 25 years of age and even older – is amazingly huge. The hunger that you have for disruptive solutions is amazingly impressive. That is something that’s also found in other smaller markets like the Philippines,” he said.   

The AI-powered app uses a mix of technologies including LLMs, voice cloning and lip-sync. “We haven’t developed our own LLM. Instead, we have used the best implementations of the LLMs available in the market, which have changed a lot in the past year,” said Cuervo. Open source models have been used for Rili. 

Digital Social Media 

Sample UI for Rili AI. Source: Rili

With Rili ai, whose motto is ‘Search, Explore, and Bond’, Camacho and Cuervo are looking to address multiple problems. From providing a digital assistant to the lonely, to serving as a legacy piece where a human’s persona and brains are transferred to your digital twin, Rili’s biggest goal is to create a new kind of social media. 

“When Facebook and all social networks were born, we were destined to have interactions with each other. Now with Instagram and TikTok, communication is just one way – you are just sitting there and consuming,” said Cuervo. “We think we should use these types of tools to sense this process and help people to build real bonds. We can be the first social network in the sense that enables us to be better and establish true bonds with other people around the world.” 

Crossing Boundaries

Rili is trained by users with their own knowledge through chat, which can be text or voice messages, by speaking into a microphone. The application is also able to gather digital user information from platforms such as X, Twitch and YouTube, which fortifies the personalisation factor. 

With the capability to deliver content in over 100 languages, including Hindi, Rili is aiming to break the global divide and achieve a larger audience. The addition of further languages is not a problem. “It’s quite easy to just incorporate a new language by having this user interface modified, because the inner brain already has this capability; it isn’t a problem at all,” said Cuervo. 

The founders believe that knowledge limitations from language barriers should never be a hindrance. “Enhancing bi-directional communication is our physical goal. We want to change the way that people communicate, we want them to speak to each other not only to consume creator content, but to also bond with these creators,” said Camacho.  

Superhero Entrepreneurs 

Camacho and Cuervo, who have been dabbling in their entrepreneurial journey for over a decade, previously founded an AI company Hocelot, which was headquartered in Brussels. The company specialises in datasets and next-generation analytics in real-time to address specific business needs. 

“We spend a lot of money investing in assets like flats, etc, but the most important asset we have in life is our brain,” said Camacho. “When we pass away, we can leave our legacy to our kids and family, with our thoughts and knowledge. That’s another way we are exploring to monetise in the future.” 

Talking about the company’s nomenclature, the founders said, “We are Spanish, and ‘Rili’ is how a Spanish speaker will write ‘really’, and with artificial intelligence, it is ‘Rili AI’, which sounds like ‘Really I’ — is it really me?” said Camacho. “We like the brand name; it’s easy to remember and has a lot of connotations that we like.”

Rili is available in both iOS and Android platforms. The Rili alpha version is already live for users to join the waitlist.