Cleo, an AI friend you set up yourself

A mobile app for chatting with AI companions: pick a persona and the mood you want, then talk to it like you would a friend. I designed it and built the app's front end; a friend built the backend.

Year: 2025
Role: Design and frontend
Team: Me and a friend (backend)
Platform: Mobile app (React Native, Expo)

The welcome screen's illustration

Idea

Most AI chat feels like talking to a tool. Cleo lets you choose who you're talking to: a persona with its own personality and mood.

What I did

Designed the app and built its screens in React Native: welcome, personas, conversations and the chat itself.

Where it is

The screens and the backend were built separately and never wired together; the app runs on sample conversations.

What's in it

Two halves of one app

The app

Expo and React Native: a welcome screen, a personas tab with persona cards, a conversations list and a chat screen, on shared colour, type and spacing tokens.

The personas

Each one has a name, a personality, a colour and what it's good at, from a creative companion to a study partner.

The backend

My friend's FastAPI service: sign-up and login, personas stored with their own instructions, and replies generated from the last few messages of the chat.

How I approached it

Making AI feel like a friend

Placeholder: why you and your friend started Cleo, how the persona and mood idea came about, and how the design changed from the first persona cards to the mood-based ones.

The app