Imagine chatting with Friedrich Nietzsche, Socrates, and René Descartes about the meaning of life. Well, there’s an app for that.
Character.AI, a startup that offers a chatbot service where users can have open-ended conversations with different characters based on real and imagined personalities, launched last September. Characters include an English teacher who will help you with grammar or a psychologist who can provide support. If users don’t click with one of the 18 million characters available, they can create a new one.
Founded by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, two former employees at Google Brain—the AI lab within the tech giant—Character.AI is betting that people want to engage with a variety of chatbots. The startup has raised $190 million in funding from investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Greycroft to date.
Notably, the company says that as of August, users on the platform spend an average of two hours a day with its chatbots. Part of the explanation the company gives is that people are interacting with different characters, which is more engaging than passively scrolling a site.
Hoping to continue to attract and retain more users—a base that currently stands at 10 million monthly active ones—the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company rolled out a feature this week where people can have a group chat on Character.AI with up to five AI characters and five humans at once. Users can identify who’s human and who’s not by looking at the group chat settings.
The group chat feature is available to paid users. The subscription, which is $9.99 a month and allows users to skip any waiting queues—needed to manage situations when there’s peak demand for the service to prevent outages or slow performance—is what helps the company scale its services. Character.AI’s service is powered by large language models, which are costly to run. The company says the feature will become available to everyone in the future.
Character.AI’s latest feature comes after Meta launched its own version of more than two dozen AI characters last month, inspired by real people like Kendall Jenner and Naomi Osaka, across its products. In response, Character.AI quickly called out the likeness on Twitter, highlighting how heated the race to build AI bots has become.