Character.AI: What is It and a Detailed Review [2023]

What is Character.AI?

Character.AI is an AI chatbot platform that hosts many user-generated chatbots called Characters, which can be based on anything from famous personalities and movie characters to virtual assistants and image generators. Users can also create and train their Characters on the platform for free.

Character.AI has a Character Community where users can share their public Character and ask for tips and suggestions about Character creation.

Is Character.AI Right for You?

We recommend Character.AI if:

• You like to experiment with different prompts on various user-generated AI Characters.
• You want to create your personal AI Character for free and customize its features.
• You want access to interactive AI Characters that can generate images, host text-based games, etc., for recreational purposes.

Character.AI might not be ideal for users who:

• You want access to AI chatbots that show reliable information.
• You’re uncomfortable inputting personal or sensitive data on the tool’s Characters.
• You prefer offline-capable AI chatbot platforms.

Pros & Cons of Character.AI

Pros

Cons

What Sets Character.AI Apart

Compared to other AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Kajiwoto, Chai AI, and Botify AI, Character.AI grants users creative freedom when creating their Character, which can be based on their favorite movie character, personality, anime character and other themes and applications supported by the platform. They can also share their Character publicly with Character.AI’s Character Community for feedback.

Casual users can have human-like conversations with various user-generated Characters through the platform’s powerful LLMs. Character.AI also has a mobile app for Android and iOS users.

Key Features

As an AI chatbot platform, here are some of Character.AI’s key features:

Create a Character

One of Character.AI’s main features is the Create a Character tool; it allows users to create their personal AI chatbot from scratch. They can also personalize their name, avatar, greeting, and visibility and fine-tune their conversations. When the Character is set to Public, other users can help improve it using a star-based feedback system.

In this example, we’ll make a character about Iron Man. We’ll set up the AI Character by adding its custom name, greeting, visibility (Public, Unlisted, or Private), and avatar:

Next, you can edit more of its details by selecting Edit Details (Advanced) to include your Character on the platform’s Character Book (database of all Characters). However, we’ll directly create the tool using the customizations from earlier by choosing Create and Chat!:

Then, we’ll ask Iron Man a few simple questions, like where he is from and what he does for a living:

Finally, we’ll ask what his superpowers are:

Overall, the Character’s responses were reasonably accurate and had context, despite creating it using default settings and without inputting custom definitions or other advanced details for the chatbot.

AI Characters

Another popular feature of Character.AI is the ability to chat with various user-generated Characters. Users can choose from over 15 Character themes, like anime characters, known personalities, animals, image-generating Characters, and more. It’s important to note that most of the responses generated by the AI Characters on the platform are primarily fictional and are not considered reliable sources of information.

For instance, we’ll chat with famous football star Cristiano Ronaldo:

We’ll ask him about his favorite football rival of all time:

Then, we’ll ask him how much he made this year in football and his favorite shoe brand:

Based on its answers, the Character can engage in a human-like conversation and with context. This time, we’ll try out a Flag generator made by a user on the platform. To start, we’ll ask the Character to create a fictional flag of Asia:

Its response was odd since its description and photo didn’t match—it showed more of an Italian flag.

Next, we’ll ask it to generate a flag for the United States of America:

While the Character shows a factual description of the USA flag, the generated photo lacks details compared to the original flag.

Overall, we had fun using the platform’s user-generated Characters. They were functional and generated human-like conversations. However, it can have inaccurate responses (e.g., wrong flags shown on the Flag Generator), which users can improve through feedback.

Pricing

While Character.AI is mostly a free AI chatbot platform, it offers Character.AI +, which costs $9.99 monthly. It’s a premium service that grants priority access to the platform’s services, faster response times, and early access to new features. Premium users will also have a private community, which includes other Character.AI + users.

Final Thoughts on Character.AI

Character.AI is an entertaining AI chatbot platform that hosts various user-generated Characters, like known celebrities, movie characters, image generators, virtual assistants, chat-based games, and more. We liked its Create a Character feature, where users can quickly create their custom character from scratch by setting up its name, greeting, visibility, and avatar.

We rated Character.AI 4.2/5 due to its user-friendliness and diverse amount of interactive Characters in 15 different themes. However, we experienced slow response times on some Characters. They also tend to forget key information during conversations since they have limited memory.

Overall, we highly recommend Character.AI to AI chatbot hobbyists who want to experiment with various prompts with different AI Characters.

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