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.
It was the first major chatbot to take a primarily creative and entertainment-based spin on the AI space, and it’s particularly popular with younger generations. What’s it all about? Well — you’ve come to the right place.
What is Character.ai?
The premise of Character.ai is simple. You can communicate one-on-one with characters that may be based on notable people, fictional characters from books, video games, TV shows or movies, or a conceptual person like a teacher, therapist, or coach. Similarly, you can create and train a character, giving them a humanlike personality and introducing them to the Character.ai community. Other features allow you to share your conversations publicly within the community and allow the fictional characters to communicate with each other.
You can test the service for free by beginning a conversation with no sign-up; however, it will eventually prompt you to register after a few turns. Its Character.ai Plus paid subscription option includes faster response times, early access to new features, and a c.ai+ supporter badge, among other perks.
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.
Users flocked to the service with the interesting model as an alternative while OpenAI sorted out its bandwidth but over time, it has stood out as a formidable competitor among the many text-to-speech generators. The company is run by former developers of Google’s LaMDA LLM and Meena chatbot.
How to use Character.ai
You can access the web version of the service by going to character.ai on your browser of choice. As previously mentioned, you don’t have to sign up right away to try the service, but eventually, you will get a notice prompting you to register an account.
I don’t know exactly how much input I was allowed, but I chatted for about ten to fifteen minutes before I got a registration notice. There is an easy registration for Google or Apple accounts. There’s also a manual input of your email and password.
Once you’ve registered and bypassed the introductory prompts you’ll see the homepage. Here you’ll get an idea of the characters you can interact with via the different sections that are available. There is a For you section in the uppermost section of the home page, which includes characters you may have already interacted with and some similar personas. Below that, Character.ai may advertise any new features that may be available to the service.
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 has since updated its web version in April to a new layout and tweaked some aspects and features since its original design. You can currently still access the previous version by selecting your account name at the bottom of the page and selecting Back to old site. Click the Try it now option on the old version, to return to the current version of Character.ai.
How to select and communicate with a character
Accessing characters within Character.ai is simple. I found the “Mario from Super Mario 64” character to converse with in the For you section. Selecting this character automatically opens up a chatroom and it takes a few seconds for Mario to populate his thoughts and say a few words. Once I responded, we were off to the races in a full-blown conversation about how we would find Princess Peach.
Once you’re registered and logged in to your account it will save your progress so you can return to the conversation whenever you desire. If you don’t access your account or a character for some time, your conversation may be archived; however, you can populate it again by accessing the History section within the settings of the chat.
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.
He also did this in other instances by telling me not to be afraid of the Boos in Bowser’s castle, when I initially introduced Boos into the conversation earlier.
However, I found him to be very one-tracked, which might be on brand for Mario. He was not able to identify any minor characters that you might find in the Super Mario 64 video game. When I asked if he might need help from anyone, such as Dorrie he didn’t know who that was but continued on the concept of trying to save Princess Peach.
He was very adept at identifying the enemies, such as Goombas, Koopas, and of course, Bowser. Currently, we’re somewhere in Bowser’s castle but finding Princess Peach is a conversation for another day.
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.
Most recently, Character.ai announced a Character Calls feature for mobile, which allows you to communicate with characters in a speech-to-speech manner, like a telephone call.
How to create and train characters
As mentioned, you have the option to create your own avatars on the Character.ai text generator. Characters don’t have to be notable figures, they can be anything you want from made-up people to RPGs to pets. All you have to do is select Create on the home page and Create a Character.
Then you fill out the parameters and upload a photo. Then you Select Create and Chat. From there you interact with your avatar in order to train it to your specifications. You can set your character to Public, Unlisted, or Private to determine whether you share it with others.
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. Fill out the parameters, including adding the characters you want, and save your room. Your characters will begin chatting with each other automatically.
The latest version of Character.ai on the web does not support the Rooms feature. The service scrapped Rooms for a new feature called group chat, which is available as a perk of the paid C.ai+ subscription on mobile. Character.ai says it has plans to bring group chat support to the web in the future, with a long-term goal of it being a feature for the general public.
How to manage your account
If you happen to use Character.ai a lot and want to keep your account orderly, you can do so by keeping in mind various maintenance functions. There are methods for permanently deleting chats from your character conversations and removing characters from your accounts. To delete chats, select the three-dot icon and then Delete message from the drop-down menu. Keep in mind you have to delete each message one by one.
To declutter characters from your home page, you can select the three-dot icon next to each character on the left side and then Remove from recents. If you’re clearing custom characters, keep in mind they will still exist in your public profile, so setting them to private is another option if you don’t want them viewed by others.
Using the Character.ai feed
The Character.ai feed was a popular feature of the old web interface, which allowed you to see chats and rooms that people have created, and many are quite entertaining. Many are just excerpts that allow you to get the joke of what was likely a longer conversation.
Some character-to-character conversations I stumbled upon include Tim Cook spilling all the secrets for the several generations of future iPhones and “my last two brain cells fighting for dominance.”
However, the chats are quickly lost if you scroll away from them, refresh or navigate away from the Feed page in any way. I suppose this is a method to keep the content fresh. However, I did notice there were a fair amount of chats set up trying to get the characters to swear to say things that went against the Character.ai policies.
With various updates, the feed is not as popular as it once was and likely replaced by premium features such as group chats and exclusive C.ai+ communities. However, you can still access the Character.ai feed by converting to the old site.
