[News] China’s invisible friends: AI companions flourish as Big Tech piles in

Chinese tech giants Baidu, Tencent, and ByteDance are investing in generative AI (GenAI) to create virtual companions for lonely individuals, similar to foreign apps like Character.ai and Replika. These apps, such as ByteDance's Maoxiang, Tencent's Zhumengdao, and Baidu's Xiaokan Planet, generate humanlike responses with unique personalities, allowing users to customize their digital friends' looks, voices, and traits. According to analysts, AI companion apps have emerged as a particularly promising area for GenAI, with "the clearest revenue source at the moment" - they are free to use with basic features, but offer paid subscriptions and in-app purchases for additional perks, and users can even sell their developed virtual characters. Maoxiang has experienced rapid growth, becoming the third-largest virtual companion app in China by downloads in May, while Xiaoice's X Eva app, a Microsoft spin-off, remains the market leader with 12.4 million downloads.

Summarized by Llama 3 70B