Character.ai (stylized as Character.AI, c.ai and character.ai, also known as Character AI or just Character) 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.[1][2]
Character.ai
Type of site
Chatbot, artificial intelligence, deep learning
Available in
English, Spanish, French, Italian, European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Turkish, Polish, Russian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Bulgarian, Czech, Greek, Finnish, Hindi, Croatian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Dutch, Romanian, Swedish, Ukrainian
Founder(s)
Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas
URL
character.ai
Registration
Optional; required to remove certain limits
Launched
September 16, 2022; 12 months ago
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.[3][2]
Previously having only been accessible via its website, a mobile app was released for both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store on May 23, 2023, surpassing 1.7 million downloads within its first week.[4]
In May 2023, the service was also officially monetized, adding a premium monthly $9.99 USD subscription known as c.ai+ that allows for perks such as priority chat access, faster response times, and early access to new features.[5][6]
Contents
Generation
Edit
A user conversing with a Character.ai simulation of Ludwig Wittgenstein
When a character sends back a response, users can rate the response from 1 to 4 stars. In addition, users can give reasons on why a certain amount of stars are chosen by clicking on one of 4 to 6 buttons. The rating predominantly affects the specific character, but also affects the behavioral selection as a whole. The user can also click the right arrow/swipe left for the AI to generate a new response, and later look through the generated messages by clicking on the left arrow.[7]
Built from advanced deep learning and expansive language models, the software is currently in beta and continually undergoing improvement; on 5 November 2022, conversation memory was increased by double the previous capacity so that the AI would be able to "remember" messages from farther back.[8]
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.[9]
