Tone, consent, and emotional bandwidth as first-class controls.
Most people know what they feel. Fewer know how those feelings affect the people around them. Attune explores ways technology might help people better understand tone and emotional context before misunderstandings happen — with consent and privacy built in from the start.
The principle — read emotional state, respect it, always with consent — runs across a system. The physical and caregiving side lives in Companion Health. The human-assistant side:
Sassitivity Slider
Real-time Siri personality — dial from Sensitive to Sassitive.
Consent controls
“I’d rather not” and “No thank you” as graceful refusal.
Gentle iOS Mode
A calmer, lower-bandwidth interface for hard moments.
Awareness Receipts
Share emotional availability, not just read status.
Companion Health
Quiet care signals for pets and caregiving relationships.
Harmony Clock
An ambient sense of how loved ones are doing — not where they are.
One of the sharpest distinctions in the framework: two phrases that look similar reveal a fundamentally different design problem.
"No thank you"
An external boundary. The world is asking something of me and I am declining. The request comes from outside; the refusal is clean.
"I don't want to"
An internal boundary. I am struggling with myself. The task is mine — I assigned it. The resistance is not to an external request but to my own capacity.
Today's software tends to treat these as the same thing. Attune treats them differently — because, to the person living them, they are. A later layer explores a model for this called moodwidth: the emotional capacity available at a given moment. Not mood, not productivity — capacity. Someone with low moodwidth doesn't need another reminder. They need the system to notice, ease off, and ask what would help.
One feature from the system, made interactive: when Siri is invoked, you set how it responds. Drag the slider to hear the same request answered differently — the graceful "no" adapts to the same tone. This is a prototype, not a shipped product. Five tones, a handful of scenarios, handwritten responses. Enough to prove the smallest unit of the idea is real and worth building toward.
If you'd rather not, the graceful out adapts to the same tone:
Not nowI defined the interaction patterns and emotional model — the tone framework, the internal/external boundary taxonomy, the moodwidth capacity concept, and the connection to Companion Health's physical endpoint. The Sassitivity Slider above is the only working software prototype; the rest is a mature design exploration, ready to be built from.
Tone and consent deserve to be first-class controls, not buried settings. And resistance — "I don't want to" — is information worth attending to, not friction to overcome.