Companies swear up and down that they aren’t using smartphone apps to eavesdrop on our conversations and serve up hyper-focused ads.
The app is the brainchild of Matt Reed, a creative technologist at redpepper who was also responsible for the short-lived tool that would Rickroll Zoom meetings, as well as the Zoombot which let users create a digital twin that could attentively sit in on video calls on their behalf.
Whereas PayPal has users exchanging real money back and forth, SayPal instead deals with imaginary currencies like brand recognition and Bitcoin.
The app’s biggest challenge isn’t convincing brands to go along with the idea, it’s distinguishing name-drops that naturally come up in conversation versus someone staring at their phone while they repeat the word “Supreme” for hours on end.
Unless it is an all new or substantially changed product from last year, an ad has never made me purchase anything.