Temper text app

Turn down the heat on your text fights. Temper is a simple app that softens your angry texts and decodes whoever you’re fighting with.

Welcome to Temper, a deliberately simple app and iMessages extension that helps you soften reactive text messages before sending them and decode hurtful texts you receive from others. It uses AI to reframe texts to be constructive, relational, and respectful.

It’s for those few seconds right at the beginning of a text fight when you have enough presence of mind to recognize that you should shut up but not enough self-control to actually shut up. If you can open Temper during those few precious seconds of self-awareness, you have a shot at diverting things onto a more constructive path.

The name of the app comes from the Old English temprian and Latin temperare—to mix in due proportion, to moderate. In metalworking, to temper steel is to heat it and cool it carefully, transforming brittleness into resilience. The name suggests the same process applied to emotion: bringing reactive heat under control to produce something stronger and more considered.

The app is optimized to make the text tempering process as easy as possible:

• The “temper” button constructively reframes an angry text you’re about to send, then with one click pastes it into your text thread. • The “decode” button constructively interprets the hurt feelings beneath your fight-partner’s angry text, giving the message back to you in a form that’s easier to hear. It also suggests a constructive reply that you can easily one-click into the thread. • The “request a pause” button copies over to your thread a pre-written request for a time-out for 20, 30, 45, or 60 minutes and also activates an alert on your phone to remind you to reconnect at the end of the time-out.

When we’re flooded with stress hormones, we’re already in a space of automatic response. Temper is designed to take one form of very destructive automaticity and allow you to choose, by opening the app and pushing the button, to replace it with another form of automaticity that’s carefully designed to do less harm (and maybe even some good).

That’s it. Open the app or the iMessages extension. Write or copy in a message, let it reframe or decode, and send a de-escalatory text back. Maybe take a breather.