Character.AI’s collection of virtual personalities, based on real and fictional sources, will be speaking thanks to the new Character Calls audio feature. The AI-powered chatbots can now have free two-way conversations via the startup’s app.
According to the company, adding voices to the synthetic humans hosted on Character.AI’s hub should make it more fun to talk to them. Users can tap a button in their chat window and start talking to the bot in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Korean, Japanese, or Chinese. If you tap while the bot is talking, the conversation will pause and you can return to texting the same way.
Character counts
The Character Calls is an extension of the Character Voices feature launched in March, which only allowed audio responses from the AI chatbots, not human voice interaction. Character.ai says there are now more than a million voice options available. For those who want to create their own Character.ai chatbot or already have some, the voice options include many styles and accents.
The company tested the new feature ahead of launch and said more than 20 million calls have already been made by more than 3 million people. Those calls included people learning new languages, practicing for job interviews, and working on game characters and storytelling ideas.
Character.ai was early to the virtual celebrity and AI-powered friends market, but it may need this new feature to keep up with recent competition. Meta now offers Celebrity AI chatbots tied to official partnerships with those celebrities. And Google is reportedly working on something similar, possibly targeting YouTube and YouTube influencers, letting people design their own chatbots.