Elon Musk to Einstein, Character.ai lets you talk to chatbot versions of celebrities

While interacting with a chatbot, be it ChatGPT or Google Bard, have you ever felt that they are all sort of bland and boring? Well, there is a new AI platform in the market that lets you interact with chatbots that are a lot of fun. Character.ai is an AI platform that lets you talk to famous personalities like Elon Musk, Albert Einstein, and even fictional ones like Batman. But that’s not all, the platform also lets you talk to chatbots that can help you with certain tasks like a creative helper bot, a story maker bot, and more. Let us take a closer look.

Character.ai is a Palo Alto-based startup founded by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, who were previously developers of Google's LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). Last week, the platform was turned into a mobile application for both iOS and Android. The startup claims to have recorded a total of 1.7 million downloads across both platforms.

Meet Character.ai

Character.AI is a chatbot platform that lets you speak with digital versions of famous personalities, whether real or fictional and to converse with them freely with open-ended conversations. The platform was publicly launched in September 2022. It uses complex learning models to generate human-like text responses and participate in the contextual conversation.

However, unlike ChatGPT, its real aim is not to provide you with information but to entertain you. In a recent interview with New York Times, the creators explained, “These systems are not designed for truth. They are designed for plausible conversation [...] Character.AI is useful today – for fun, for emotional support, for generating ideas, for all kinds of creativity”, as per a report by TechRadar.

And while the platform has a sizable number of characters you can freely interact with, it gets even better because you can create your own character and put them through the web application’s learning model to let others interact with it.

Further, the platform has a bunch of chatbots that offer other ways of entertainment. For example, Highschool Simulator is a text-based game where you have to survive as the new kid in a weird school. Similarly, Story Maker can write a story for you based on the prompt you share.

Of course, no AI platform can be without its limitations and Character.AI is no exception. Some of its limitations include limited memory, lack of factual information, a basic level of imitation of the personality it is based on, and its inability to understand sarcasm and the tone of the sentence written.