Character.ai

Character.ai (also known as c.ai or Character AI) is a neural language model chatbot service that can generate human-like text responses and participate in contextual conversation. Constructed by previous developers of Google's LaMDA, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, the beta model was made available to use by the public in September 2022.

Users can create "characters", craft their "personalities", set specific parameters, and then publish them to the community for others to chat with. Many characters may be based on fictional media sources or celebrities, while others are completely original, some being made with certain goals in mind such as assisting with creative writing or being a text-based adventure game.

In May 2023, the service added a monthly subscription option and a mobile app was released for both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, which had over 1.7 million downloads within its first week.

History
Character.ai was established in November 2021. The company’s co-founders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, were both engineers from Google. While at Google, the co-founders both worked on AI-related projects: Shazeer was a lead author on a paper that Business Insider reported in April 2023 “has been widely cited as key to today's chatbots”, and De Freitas was the lead designer of an experimental AI at Google initially called Meena, which would later become known as LaMDA.

Character.ai raised $43 million in seed funding at the time of its initial foundation in 2021.

The first beta version of Character.ai’s service was made available to the public in September of 2022. The Washington Post reported in October 2022 that the site had “logged hundreds of thousands of user interactions in its first three weeks of beta-testing”. It allowed users to create their own new characters, and to play text-adventure game scenarios where users navigate scenarios described and managed by the chatbot characters.

Following a $150 million dollar funding round in March 2023, Character.ai became valued at approximately $1 billion.

Software


Built from advanced deep learning and expansive language models, the software is currently in beta and continually undergoing improvement; on November 5, 2022, conversation memory was increased by double the previous capacity so that the AI would be able to "remember" messages from farther back.

Character "personalities" are designed via descriptions from the point of view of the character and its greeting message, and further molded from conversations made into examples, giving its messages a star rating and modification to fit the precise dialect and identity the user desires.

When a character sends back a response, the user can rate the response from 1 to 4 stars, and optionally provide more feedback such as "not true" or "out of character" through checkboxes. The rating predominantly affects the specific character, but also affects the behavioral selection as a whole.