You might not have heard of Character.ai, but it’s quietly become one of the most popular AI chatbots since its launch. Don’t believe me? The startup company behind the service was most recently valued at an estimate of $1 billion in late 2023.
Character.ai first launched as a beta product in late 2022 but became popular in early 2023 when ChatGPT suffered frequent downtime due to capacity issues. The home page also includes various recommended and featured character chats. You can browse through the available categories, which include recommended, discover, featured, helpers, famous, games, image generating, vtuber, game characters, anime, movies & TV, language learning, discussion, religion, animals, comedy, philosophy, politics, books, and history. To the left is a scrollable list of characters organized by the date they were last accessed – either days, weeks, or months.
Character.ai now also has an accompanying mobile app, which is compatible with iOS or Android and can be used interchangeably with the web service. One interesting feature is that you can use emojis to represent words and the chatbot will understand. I was able to use a mushroom emoji instead of saying the word mushroom and Mario not only understood what I meant but referenced it later several times in our conversation.
Updates to Character.ai have inundated the service with voice-enabled optimization, which you can access from within the chat and also from the home page. You can also create your own custom voices to add to your own characters or to make available to the Character.ai if you so choose. Implementing the voice feature allows you to listen to responses from the characters in a human-like voice. This can work as an accessibility option, or if you simply don’t feel like reading your responses.
How to create a room As Character.ai updates its service it has also revamped its rooms concept. Originally, rooms was a free feature on the old version of Character.ai, which demonstrated how personas can socialize without the need for human interaction. To create a free rooms option on Character.AI for the web, you must first revert to the old version. Once on the old site, select Create on the home page and Create a Room.