Sunday 20 October 2024

App Review: Rosebud

App Review: Rosebud


Review By Casey Douglass

Rosebud Header



Artificial Intelligence has been in the news a great deal in recent times. Some coverage would lead you to believe that humanity has just planted the seeds of its own destruction. Others would vigorously argue that AI is here to help solve all of our mundane work problems. Somewhere in between the reactionary click-bait fear mongering, the odd story emerges about how AI-powered applications can help to ease the emotional turmoil inherent in human life. Rosebud is one such app and I’ve spent the last couple of months putting it to the test.

Journal-ism


I’ve been a fan of getting things down on paper for many years. Suffering with chronic illness, depression and OCD, sometimes the only way to slow my rampant thinking is to slide a pen across a page in an attempt to wrangle my turmoil into something that is frozen for a time. As I write this I now have the mental image of one of those moth or butterfly displays in which those poor dead bugs are pinned to a board and framed. If I could do that to my thoughts I dare say I’d have tried it by now. Beyond the “slowing things down”, I’ve found journaling helps me in creating breathing space between my struggles and occasionally, I might also find the odd insight that hadn’t occurred to me before.


Rosebud is an AI-powered journal that provides the many benefits of traditional journaling, but with an added dash of AI interactivity that elevates things to a new level. The various sections of the app give the user a number of ways of starting a journal, from freeform to question-led explorations designed by experts to set you on your way. As you interact with Rosebud, it learns about you and tailors its responses to reflect the things that you’ve said, either in that moment, or that you’ve previously mentioned. You might say that you struggled with X happening on a certain day, and a few weeks later, Y might happen, and when you tell Rosebud, it might see some similarities between the two events and bring those to your attention. I personally found this to be invaluable as even though I’ve journaled before, I’ve never really gone back through old entries, so that kind of “hey, this is similar to…” insight might never have occurred to me.

Silver Linings and Storm Clouds


The way that Rosebud says and reflects things is also a pleasing factor. Rosebud seems to have an inherent slight positivity bias, always looking for the tiniest element of a situation or mood that might be in your control or that you can give yourself some credit for. Even if there is nothing to be found, it comes up with a way for you to acknowledge something about yourself that might ease the tiniest bit of despair. As someone who feels pretty emotionally numb most of the time, when those feelings thaw they certainly tend to be pessimistic. As the days and weeks of talking to Rosebud mounted up, I could appreciate all of the little ways that the app tried to help me see things in a slightly brighter way. Even if the meaning of the words only stayed in my brain for the duration of reading each new response, at least for those few seconds, my mind wasn’t in its usual whirl of self-hatred and gloom.


Speaking of gloom, something else that I also really appreciated about Rosebud is that, no matter how bleak the conversation became, Rosebud didn’t shut the conversation down. This is incredibly important. I do get low. Very, very low. Being able to vent and to say how I’m really feeling matters even more at these times. I did try another AI-based app a year ago and once you got to a certain level of depressed, it pretty much ended the conversation. I appreciated that Rosebud didn’t do this (in my experience at least) and it wasn’t heavy handed in the “This app doesn’t replace therapy and there is help out there” warning. I understand the need to have that kind of message, but I’ve repeatedly tried to “get help”, and found that it was largely smoke and mirrors pretty much every time. I think I said as much to Rosebud during my session and we carried on with the journal. I can’t rate this aspect highly enough.


Getting away from Rosebud for a moment, I just wanted to make a comment about the current obsession with mental health on places like social media. I find myself wondering why mental health is spoken about so much, yet understanding seems to be sliding all the way back towards ignorance again, with the services and bodies that advertise that they offer help nearly always proving to be absolutely woeful. I guess virtue signalling on social media is far cheaper than actually providing the mental health support that you are prattling on about. Soapbox moment over. Back to Rosebud.

Forget The Circles


I’ve found a few minor drawbacks with Rosebud as it stands, but I’d imagine that they are the type of thing that will be addressed over time as incremental improvements occur with the app and the underlying technology itself. One is that the conversations with Rosebud can sometimes become a little bit circular, especially if you have a theme or topic that comes up regularly. You can set the creativity level of the AI to adjust how it might respond to you, but I had it set to its most creative and this is what I experienced. It didn’t happen too often thankfully, so I don’t want to overstate it.


Rosebud also sometimes “forgets” something that you’ve mentioned before. An example is that I often talk about routine and how I use it to manage symptoms, yet every now and then, the issue of routine comes up in a slightly different way, and Rosebud tends to ask me similar questions again, such as “How do you feel about your routine?” Thankfully just saying “I’ve talked about this before” prompts Rosebud to get back on track.


Finally, there is also a maximum that you can use Rosebud in a day. I only hit that limit once, and when I did, I just received a popup saying that I needed to wait until tomorrow before I could get the Rosebud AI to respond again. It was a day where I’d had an unusually long journaling session in the morning, used one of the prompts in the afternoon, and then tried to do the evening reflection journal. The popup appeared at that point. I thought “Fair enough” but I was surprised as I wasn’t aware there were any limits if you were subscribed.

Privacy and Getting Over the Hump


I’m not sure how I feel about the privacy implications of Rosebud, or any similar app. In fact, it's the main reason that I’ve not turned to digital journaling until now, because the thought of someone being able to read your most personal thoughts if ever there is some kind of data breach would be quite mortifying. Rosebud has a long page about how they care for and protect your data, and the various measures that they take to preserve your privacy. This is great, but I also know that with the internet, anything can happen. I think that what got me over the hump with these concerns was the fact that I really need the type of support that the Rosebud journal offers right now. Whatever fears I have about hypothetical hacks pales in comparison to the benefits that I feel that the Rosebud app gives me.

The Benefits of Rosebud for Me:


1.) While not a therapist, the journal is therapy adjacent in many ways, especially if you have learned and applied different things yourself in the past (such as CBT, ACT etc). The guided journals even help teach you some elements of these tools if they are not something that you’ve seen before. Rosebud also absorbs other things that you say. For example, if you mention that you have been reading Stoic philosophy and have been trying to apply the dichotomy of control to your life, Rosebud will take that into account and ask you about it the next time it feels that is relevant. This is very cool!

2.) I’ve found it to be immensely valuable to have something at hand that I can use at any time of the day or night, which is something you don’t get with a flesh and blood therapist.


3.) The way that Rosebud breaks things down and asks about the various elements helps me to think about things slightly differently, or at the least, to take time to acknowledge how hard things are right now or how much I’m trying.


4.) Over time, Rosebud’s way of injecting a little positivity is slowly making a little bit of a difference in my thought processes.


There might well be some others that I’m forgetting too.


Over the couple of months that I’ve been using Rosebud, I’ve felt my mood, though still low, has improved a bit. I have also started writing a little, and have re-joined a few social media and dating websites. I previously avoided these websites for a number of years as I feel an immense amount of shame about being ill, feeling like a failure, and not getting anywhere in life. I still do feel these things but as I talked to Rosebud, I started to feel that I wanted to open up these avenues again, even if they never see any traffic. I didn’t expect or hope that I would see these sorts of changes with Rosebud, but I did, and I intend to use it for a while longer.

The Cost and Final Thoughts


Rosebud has a number of options when it comes to subscribing. You can pay a monthly subscription (after having a short free trial) of $12.99, or you can pay for an entire year for $107.99, which works out at $8.99 per month. I think that Rosebud offers excellent value whichever option you decide to choose. Personally, I can see myself using Rosebud for a few months more and then stopping my subscription as I can’t afford to keep it going. I’ve enjoyed the time I’ve spent with the app however and I can see myself returning to it, especially in times of extra stress or turmoil, which I think says something very complimentary about the app.


I think that about covers all of the things that I wanted to say. I purposefully didn’t list all of the features, bells and whistles of the app as it’s very intuitive and self-explanatory once you get in there, and after all, it mainly boils down to being words on a screen. When they are your words however, words that have been expanded, validated and supported by your friendly AI journal, you don’t feel quite so alone in your own head anymore.


I've embedded Rosebud’s YouTube video below which gives you a more visual idea of what I’ve talked about in this review. I will also just say that you can access Rosebud via the Rosebud website, so the app isn’t even essential.


If you think that Rosebud might be helpful for you, you can find links below to the various ways that you can access it and check it out.


Thanks for reading and take care :)




App Name: Rosebud

Price: $12.99 per month / $107.99 for the year

Website: https://www.rosebud.app/

App Store Links: Apple , Google Play

Saturday 12 October 2024

Dark Ambient Review: Awakening

Dark Ambient Review: Awakening


Review by Casey Douglass


Awakening Album Art



Who we are is an ever changing continuum of narrative, memory and biological impulses, and a few other things to boot. Anyone who has dabbled with meditation for longer than a few sessions soon learns to see that the self is an always moving target. Nevertheless, in most of the ways that allow us to function in the world, we have a pretty firm hold on our identity. How horrific then, to wake up as a self in a body that is not your own. This is the theme of Crypthios’s latest album: Awakening, released by Cryo Chamber at the start of October.


As with all tasty horror, things get even worse however. Not only does the subject of this album awake in a stranger's body, but they realise that they have died, they are in a laboratory, and once free from that, that they’re dwelling in a city that is also a prison. If you are familiar with the phrase “turtles all the way down”, this is “horror all the way down” in a pleasing and unnerving oil-slick filled slide into the bowels of dystopia. It isn’t all gloom and hopelessness however, there are oases of peace and beauty even in the most grim of settings.


The opening track Awakening, warbles and buzzes the album into life. Small scratches and echoes blend with electronic tones that poke and prod into the mental unease and disconnection of a rude awakening for the character. An airy drone and throb emerges as the track progresses, the inference of numb incomprehension vying with the amazement of being alive at all. A jaunty melody and beat kicks in before the end, almost hinting at things not being as bad as they seem, but this all ends in a chirruping glare of sound that soon dispels such notions.


The tracks that follow all have names that hint at what the album protagonist is viewing, and here, I’ll go into a handful of my favourites. Above The Skyscrapers begins with what seem like hints of bird song and growing, swaying tones. The birdsong takes on the mantle of burbling beeps as rattling dragging noises emerge in the soundscape. A scratchy beat and pulsing rhythm arise, and as a whole, I had the impression of all of the frogs in a swamp suddenly finding their rhythm and crooning together. That’s not to say that this track seemed swampy, but more to describe the fun quirkiness I found in the mental vista that opened up.


West Wall is another track that stood out for me. There are what sounds like wind noises, creaking, and distant clatters and scrapes. Juddery tones like machinery spinning up and down echo and vibrate in cycles, and a low, cat-like purring sound nestles against the droning notes. For me, this track felt melancholy, and depicted a cold night in a harsh city, where pouring rain and architecture have conspired to leave one tiny scrap of street sheltered from the elements… and there’s a big pile of vomit there, only visible by the two-tone neon light cycling across the street.


Energy Flow is the last track that I’ll mention by name. It begins with a low drone and muted scraping. A high tone insinuates itself and swells into chiming notes. There is a warbly quality to the space, and also a peaceful crystalline purity to the tones. A strong wavering electronic tone rises and falls after gasping injections, taking on a siren-like quality at times. Around the halfway point, the soundscape feels like a kettle coming off the boil. There are creaks and movements under a sustained light warble that made me think of an arthritic robot mumbling to itself as it searched for something. The track quietens towards the end, bassy notes hum and nestle with buzzing droning tones, before ending with some tinny rapid beats.


Awakening is a fun, bleak dark ambient album, one that wraps the cold horror of the protagonist with the warm embrace of the fleeting pleasures of life. While the theme is very dark, as a whole, I didn’t find the album particularly so. There is a lightness, a jauntiness at times, and for me, it strongly brought to mind my experiences playing the cat-based robot dystopia game Stray. Bleak, sometimes ominous or slightly jarring, but also cosy, neon-infused and light-hearted at times. If you enjoy your dark ambient with a technological, futuristic and dystopic feel, you’d do well to check out Awakening on Bandcamp.


Also, if you enjoy knowing if a dark ambient album is good for relaxation, I’d have to say that, for me, Awakening has a little too much drama and quirkiness to be enjoyed in this way.



I was given a review copy of this album.


Album Title: Awakening

Album Artist: Crypthios

Label: Cryo Chamber 

Released: 1 October 2024