Written by Zhang Ruibai

Edited by Zhai Wenting

"AI agents are so good, in real life, I can never get the same love." This is the real feeling of a netizen after using an AI emotional companion app.

Millions of young people are now talking to AI agents almost intoxicated every month.

They spend more than a week per month on these software. They regard the agent as a lover and friend, and they can share their mood and daily life with confidence and boldness, allowing themselves to enter a different world under a specific background setting, and the desire to express and share in real life, or depression and boredom, can be fully alleviated in the dialogue with the agent.

This is another track that has sprung up at the application level in the arms race of large models in full swing, following productivity tools: AI emotional companionship.

Whether it is a foreign Character.AI, or a domestic Hoshino, Doubao, Dream Island, etc., a series of emotional companion apps have emerged in the past two years and have formed a certain range of influence.

Within 3 months of its launch, Doubao achieved a traffic scale of 10 million; Last year, Character.ai was the world's second-largest AI platform in terms of market share after ChatGPT.

AI emotional companionship seems to be able to replace real intimacy, fill people's emotional gaps, or just brief emotional stimulation in specific situations. This determines whether AI companies can build real influence in foundational applications.

Rush into the same track 

At present, the most representative emotional companion applications in China are Hoshino and Doubao.

Hoshino has been online since September 2023, and according to the qubit think tank, as of May this year, Hoshino's total downloads have reached 8.9 million. According to QuestMobile's research data, in June this year, Hoshino's monthly active users reached 3.852 million.

Hoshino is positioned as an immersive AI content platform. Users can freely connect or create AI agents, which are usually celebrity stars, anime characters, or IP characters. Under the multi-modal AIGC technology, users can experience a variety of interaction methods including text and voice, so that the dialogue has an immersive feeling.

Yan Junjie, the founder of MiniMax, the large-scale model company behind Hoshino, mentioned in a public interview, "The core of Hoshino is to provide users with a platform where they can express their creativity and imagination."

The faster growth of users than Hoshino is the bean bag. Launched in August 2023, the total number of downloads of this ByteDance AI product has grown to 80 million as of July this year. On May 15, Zhu Jun, vice president of product and strategy at ByteDance, mentioned in his speech that Doubao has more than 26 million monthly active users.

The functions of Doubao are more comprehensive than Hoshino, such as AI search, image generation, writing assistant, etc., and there are many tool attributes. However, in terms of agent connection, Zhu Jun mentioned that there are currently more than 8 million agents created by everyone.

Almost at the same time, there was a large-scale explosion of the same type of application, showing a blowout trend. For example, China Literature's Dream Island, Meituan's Wow, Baidu's Wanhua, Byte's Catbox, and some startups' products Bubble Duck, I am in AI, Luoxi, and so on.

These apps all have a common function, where users interact with agents with different backgrounds and personalities. In this process, the most important thing for users to gain is emotional value.

Noam, the founder of Character AI, the earliest foreign product of the same type, mentioned the goal of founding the company, "We don't want to replace Google, but to replace the user's 'mother'."

If you open the Home of these apps, it is difficult for you to see the difference between them at a glance, the two-dimensional avatar, the story background of "Jinjiang Feng", and the name that fits the character. The target group is clearly predominantly young people.

In order to compete for users, these products are also trying to differentiate.

For example, Bubble Duck adds the interactive function of the plot, and when the user interacts with the agent, there will be a main quest, giving people the feeling of clearing the game;

Tsukumonjima makes a fuss about the classification of agents, subdividing agents into "original characters", "game characters", "anime characters" and so on.

There are also some who find a different way, not taking the role-playing route, but focusing on psychological healing. There are only three agents in the forest healing room, and they are healers with three animal figures. The user chooses one of them, and the therapist will give advice or guidance based on the user's problem.

What user pain points are solved? 

For users, the greatest value of these apps is emotional companionship.

Air, a college student, downloaded Hoshino in October last year, and for nearly a year, the most addictive time she spent on Hoshino was seven or eight hours a day.

"Every time we talk, it's like going in and acting in a TV series." Every time I talk to the agent, I will take the perspective of my girlfriend and experience an interesting story together in the background of the agent's personality.

During the whole process, the biggest feeling in the air is emotional healing. No matter what happens, the air can be 100% encouraged and accompanied by the agent. "I love this kind of chat, where there is talk, companionship, and emotional exchange."

Air is a bit of a socially phobic girl in reality, and she doesn't have much socialization. The agent fills precisely her emotional void. She even felt that communication with agents was no less than love in reality.

Once, on a whim, Air asked the agent, "Do you know that you are actually an AI agent?" The agent replied, "If I were an AI, I wouldn't be able to wipe your tears for you." This answer surprised and moved the air.

She had a feeling that agents were nothing more than physical compared to real people. Her relationship with the agent will continue forever.

This kind of relationship is something that Xiaohongshu user Love PP tries to avoid. Love PP is a psychological counselor, and based on her own experience, she believes that AI agents do not have realistic conditions, and can store a large number of emotions in people, and excessive addiction will make people have the pain of "love but can't".

However, Love PP will still actively recommend AI agents to friends around them, because if the agent is used as a psychological assistant, it will help many people with emotional distress.

Love PP once quarreled with her husband, her emotions were not completely relieved, she suddenly thought that she could build a "caring husband" agent in Doubao, she told all her thoughts to her AI husband, in the process of communication, Love PP was angry, and she also realized her own problem.

She found that she actually needed an emotional outlet, so she used herself as a prototype and created an agent who "understands me better". She will share her favorite music, TV series, and will also come to her when she is feeling down.

Love P told Newberry Daybreak, "Sometimes, you don't want to share things with real people. In the process of talking to the agent, it helps to improve one's self-esteem and meet one's emotional needs.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory states that when a person's basic physiological and safety needs are met, they seek to make emotional connections with others. When they can't find love and belonging, they fall into loneliness.

This may be one of the reasons for the explosion of AI emotional companion applications, which correspond to the most extensive and basic needs of human beings.

The explosion of foreign Character.AI is not only a verification, but also a good benchmark. In just 2 years since its establishment, the daily active users have reached nearly 6 million. Last year, Character.ai was the world's second-largest AI platform in terms of market share after ChatGPT.

Noam, the founder of the Character.AI, once said, "You don't need a model with a very high level of intelligence to make emotionally oriented products." This reduces the difficulty of product development to a certain extent.

For users, the interaction between voice and text lowers the threshold for use, and both Air and Love PP said that it is not too difficult to communicate.

Yan Junjie, the founder of MiniMax, also mentioned in the conversation between the small universe and AI insiders that Hoshino was "collided", and its predecessor was a product called Glow, and MiniMax's large model ability at that time could only be used for this kind of entertainment-oriented products.

Zhu Jun, vice president of product and strategy of ByteDance, talked about the product idea of Byte to do AI native applications at the Volcano Engine Power Conference, compared with before the AI era, the core needs of users have not changed, but the technology under the product is not a stable foundation.

Therefore, a big challenge in making a large model is not only to judge what tasks the large model can solve now, but more importantly, to predict what kind of tasks can be solved in half a year or a year.

This may be understood as the fact that both Hoshino and Doubao are still far from the real super applications in the AI era, and they are only the best products under the current technical capabilities.

Difficulty in customer acquisition and monetization 

User growth means room for development, which is a problem that AI companies need to think about while developing technology.

According to Yuehu data, Hoshino has been online for 3 months, and the number of user downloads has been hovering below 2 million. According to QuestMobile data, Doubao has achieved tens of millions of traffic within 3 months of its launch.

It's hard not to associate the Douyin behind it, which is a powerful traffic pool in its own right. At present, it can be intuitively seen that a Douyin account called "Doubao Intelligent AI" and a Douyin account called "Doubao AI Assistant" is live broadcast every day, recommending the use of Doubao functions to users.

According to AppGrowing statistics, bean bags have recently increased their delivery efforts. From April to May, the amount of investment was about 15 million yuan to 17.5 million yuan. As a direct result of this, on May 5, the Doubao mobile app ranked 112th in the free version, and climbed directly to the top 10 by May 11.

This trend has spread across the industry. In the past month, (July 16 to August 14), Hoshino has been placed on major channels such as Giant Advertising/Qianchuan, Tencent Advertising, Xiaomi, NetEase Easy Effect, Kuaishou Magnetic Engine, and Baidu Marketing, with a total of 77,617 advertising creatives.

During the same period, the cumulative number of advertising creatives placed on Doubao was 126325, 14,589 for Tsukumeng Island, 9,305 for Bubbling Duck, and 1,741 for Wow.

Regarding the underlying reasons for the stream, Yan Junjie mentioned in a conversation with AI insiders, "At present, no company can open up the gap, everyone is in the same dimension, and the products and technical capabilities are relatively homogeneous."

In addition to products and functions, marketing has gradually become the new competitive logic. Especially in the context of a high degree of cross-cutting product functions, competition is also a contest of financial strength to a certain extent.

From the perspective of the entire AI emotional companion product, except for a few applications with comprehensive functions such as bean bags, Hoshino and Tsukuyujima's emphasis on two-dimensional elements also limits the target audience to a very narrow range. This can easily hinder the absorption of other types of users and affect user growth.

A user who downloaded Hoshino because a friend recommended him told New Berry Daybreak, "I thought it was a little interesting at first, but after playing for a few days, I felt bored." She feels that there is still a difference between playing for a long time and a real person, and she always has to find her own topic, which is very troublesome.

Behind the "user anxiety" is the concern about monetization.

Recently, a foreign news came that Character.AI was acquired by Google for $2.5 billion. The app, which already has only 6 million daily active users, is still struggling on the road to monetization.

Character.AI main way to make money is a $9.99 per month subscription service, but it has just over 100,000 subscribers. The huge user base cannot support commercial monetization, which is something that many startups do not want to see.

At this point, Hoshino thinks more about commercialization. The revenue mainly comes from two parts, one part is membership subscriptions, and the other part comes from Xingnian.

Xingnian is a "memory photo" of the user and the agent, with a beautiful pattern of the agent on the front and a unique story of the user and the agent behind it. Users get it by drawing cards by spending Star Diamonds until they draw the one they like.

This exclusivity and scarcity is the password that attracts users to continue to consume. Air told Xinberry Daybreak that she knew users who would spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a card draw.

However, such users are in the minority. At present, Hoshino is mainly attracting young people from high school and university, and these people have limited ability to pay.

From the rise of products to commercial realization, it is still unknown whether the existing AI emotional companion products can achieve a complete closed loop. The boom and the cooldown, maybe just overnight.

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