According to a business formed by former Google employees, customers engage with its AI chatbots for two hours each day.

Character.AI wants people to interact with a range of bots and has collected $190 million in funding to date. Imagine discussing the meaning...

Character.AI wants people to interact with a range of bots and has collected $190 million in funding to date.

Imagine discussing the meaning of life with René Descartes, Socrates, and Friedrich Nietzsche. There is an app for that, I suppose.

Character.Last September saw the birth of AI, a startup that provides a chatbot service where users may have free-form chats with various characters based on actual and imagined characteristics. A grammar-helping English instructor or a therapist who may offer support are examples of characters. Users can build a new character if they don't click with one of the 18 million options.

Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, two former workers at Google Brain, the AI lab housed within the multinational technology company, founded Character.AI is making the assumption that users will interact with a range of chatbots. To date, the business has received $190 million in capital from backers like Greycroft and Andreessen Horowitz.

Notably, the business reports that as of August, platform users spent an average of two hours each day interacting with its chatbots. The company explains in part that this is because users are interacting with various characters, which is more interesting than simply passively scrolling a website.

The Palo Alto, California-based startup launched a feature this week that allows users to have a group chat on Character in an effort to continue bringing in and keeping more users—a base that presently stands at 4 million monthly active ones, according to Similarweb, a data analytics company.Five humans and as many as five AI characters at once. Look at the group chat settings to see who is human and who is not.

Paid users can access the group chat feature. The membership, which costs $9.99 per month and enables customers to skip any waiting lines, is what enables the company to grow its services and handle circumstances where there is a spike in demand for the service. Character.Large language models, which are expensive to run, are what power AI. The business claims that in the future, everyone will have access to the feature.

Character.The newest AI function was released after Meta last month introduced its own version of more than two dozen AI characters across all of its products, which were based on actual individuals like Kendall Jenner and Naomi Osaka. Character answers.AI soon pointed out the resemblance on Twitter, demonstrating how competitive the battle to create AI bots has become.