In the wake of the 2020s, more people than ever suffer from poor mental health and social anxiety. Being out-of-state freshmen at a large public university, the founders of OpenTalk have experienced this social anxiety firsthand: we've all stressed over how we would build new connections in our new environment after a mostly-online high school experience. In addition to regular interpersonal connections, we've also had countless interview, presentations, meetings with professors, and more higher-stress encounters.

With all of these situations, we handled our stress in different ways: pacing back and forth, thinking to ourselves, talking to a wall, etc. If only there were an app to help us practice these scenarios...

And that's where we come in. With language-learning model technology reaching an inflection point, we pounced on the opportunity to use generative AI and augmented reality to provide a realistic environment for simulating social interactions that all users can find useful.