Equel, a Helsinki-based startup, has launched a new multilingual community app aimed at entrepreneurs and professionals.

Equel functions like WhatsApp group chats. It helps users find other professionals to chat with and provides an AI assistant to make chats more productive. Equel translates conversations into multiple languages, making it easier for members to build relationships over cultural and language barriers.

Mikko Alasaarela, the founder of Equel, is a widely known expert in algorithmic influence who frequently talks about the negative effects of social media algorithms on our minds and societies. 

Alasaarela says: “We have shifted away from using social media to communicate with friends. Instead, we spend hours daily on algorithmic “For you” feeds serving content from people we don’t know. Most social media today is, in fact, anti-social. It wastes our time on a never-ending entertainment feed that makes us lonely and distorts our worldview.”

According to Alasaarela, the situation has become worse with the growth of generative AI.  Every public social media feed is already flooded with AI-generated marketing spam, lies, propaganda, and deep fakes. Armies of bots and trolls hide behind fake personas to create chaos and manipulate everyone.

Equel aims to offer a healthier, European-style alternative to social media, focusing on group chats where everyone can speak their own language. By verifying the professional identity of all members, Equel can offer a safe space for professional networking in public and private group chats. Equel accounts support the ActivityPub protocol, enabling members to communicate with Mastodon and Threads users.

Equel also has an AI assistant that can be used in all chats to make summaries, check facts, and provide useful information for the conversation.

“Our mission is to help people break their bubbles and make friends with professionals from different backgrounds. The role of AI should not be to manipulate you, but rather to help you,” says Alasaarela.

At present, Equel supports 19 languages, including Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Ukrainian, Swahili, and Swedish. The language support will expand to more languages in the coming months.

Equel is available on both Google Play and the App Store. Visit https://equelsocial.com for more information.

Contact:

Mikko Alasaarela, Founder, CEO

https://equel.me/@alasaarela 

mikko@equelsocial.com