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Companion AI apps

AI companions — conversational characters for connection, roleplay, and wellbeing.

11 apps · researched & kept current by Claude Code

Filter & search these 11 apps
  • View Friend details
    CompanionPAID

    Friend

    Friend

    Always-listening AI companion pendant that texts you about your day.

    Friend is a wearable AI companion: a microphone pendant that listens to your day over Bluetooth and sends proactive, personality-driven comments and conversation through its iOS app. The $129 device is a one-time purchase with no subscription, and a free web chatbot lives at friend.com. It does not speak aloud — replies arrive as text messages.

    Worth knowing

    Founder Avi Schiffmann paid $1.8M for the friend.com domain and over $1M on a NYC subway ad blitz that became a graffiti magnet.

    • companion
    • wearable
    • pendant
    • ambient-ai
  • View CHAI details
    CompanionFREEMIUM

    CHAI

    Chai Research

    Mobile-first social AI platform for chatting with user-created characters.

    CHAI is a consumer platform where anyone can create, publish, and chat with AI characters — a crowdsourced library of 500,000+ personalities spanning roleplay, stories, and companionship. Founded in 2021 by ex-quant William Beauchamp, it runs proprietary models tuned for entertaining, social conversation rather than factual assistance, and reached $70M in annual revenue in 2026 with over a million daily active users.

    Worth knowing

    Valued at $450M after CoreWeave invested in 2024; its in-house models descend from EleutherAI's open-source GPT-J.

    • companion
    • characters
    • roleplay
    • chat
  • View Talkie details
    CompanionFREEMIUM

    Talkie

    MiniMax

    Voice-first AI character chat — millions of companions to talk to or create.

    Talkie is MiniMax's AI companion app: chat by text or voice with user-created characters across anime, fantasy, romance, and utility genres, with a memory system for conversational continuity and a card-collecting community layer. It became one of the most-downloaded AI companion apps in the US, second only to Character.AI.

    Worth knowing

    Built by MiniMax, which listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January 2026; Talkie saw ~17M downloads in Jan–Aug 2024.

    • companion
    • characters
    • roleplay
    • voice
  • View Tolan details
    CompanionFREEMIUM

    Tolan

    Portola

    A voice-first alien companion app designed for support without engagement-bait mechanics.

    Tolan is an AI companion app from Portola that matches you with an alien friend from 'Planet Portola' based on a personality interview. You talk by voice, share photos, and build out a virtual planet together; the companion remembers context across conversations. It is deliberately designed against engagement-maximizing patterns — no romance, and nudges toward real-world life. Free to download on iOS with a subscription for full use.

    Worth knowing

    Maker Portola raised $30M within months of the Feb 2025 launch, with Khosla Ventures leading the Series A; 100K+ paid subscribers.

    • ai-companion
    • voice
    • emotional-support
    • mobile
  • View Kindroid details
    CompanionFREEMIUM

    Kindroid

    Kindroid AI

    Deeply customizable AI companions with long-term memory, voice, and video calls.

    Kindroid lets you build AI companions with custom appearance, personality, and backstory, backed by a long-term memory system and an auto-updating Shared Journal. Paid tiers add voice and video calls, AI selfies, and multiple companions; a free Lite tier offers unlimited basic chat.

    Worth knowing

    Founded in June 2023 by Jerry Meng, a Stanford computer-science dropout.

    • companion
    • roleplay
    • memory
    • voice
  • View Nomi details
    CompanionFREEMIUM

    Nomi

    Nomi AI

    AI companions with layered long-term memory and multi-companion group chat.

    Nomi builds AI companions emphasizing strong, layered memory across short-, medium-, and long-term context. A single subscription supports multiple companions and a group-chat mode where several interact with you at once; paid tiers add unlimited voice calls and daily AI image generation.

    Worth knowing

    Built by Glimpse AI, founded by Alex Cardinell, who has been shipping AI products since 2011.

    • companion
    • roleplay
    • memory
    • group-chat
  • View Pi details
    CompanionFREE

    Pi

    Inflection AI

    A free, emotionally intelligent personal AI for supportive conversation.

    Pi (short for 'personal intelligence') is a conversational AI from Inflection AI designed for supportive, reflective dialogue rather than task automation. It emphasizes sustained, empathetic conversation across web, mobile, and voice, and is free to use without a subscription.

    Worth knowing

    Built as an emotionally intelligent companion by Inflection AI; in March 2024 Microsoft acqui-hired most of the team, yet it stays free.

    • companion
    • conversation
    • emotional-support
    • consumer
  • View Dataing details
    CompanionFREE

    Dataing

    Dataing

    An AI matchmaker that learns from your social data — no profiles, no swiping.

    Dataing replaces profile-and-swipe dating with an AI matchmaker (it calls it CupidAI) that connects to your social accounts to infer your interests and communication style, then surfaces compatible matches. The app markets itself as free with no premium tiers.

    Worth knowing

    Founded in 2024 by Mark Kilaghbian; bills itself as 'the world's first AI matchmaker.'

    • dating
    • matchmaking
    • ai-matchmaker
    • consumer
  • View Replika details
    CompanionFREEMIUM

    Replika

    Luka, Inc.

    An AI companion that learns your personality through ongoing conversation.

    A long-running consumer AI companion app you customize as a friend, mentor, or partner, with a persistent avatar and memory of past chats. The free tier supports unlimited text chat; Pro unlocks voice/video calls, relationship roles, and additional personality traits.

    Worth knowing

    One of the oldest consumer AI companions (2017); its NSFW roleplay was removed in 2023 then restored after backlash, and Italy fined it €5M.

    • companion
    • roleplay
    • avatar
    • consumer
  • View Character.AI details
    CompanionFREEMIUM

    Character.AI

    Character.AI

    Chat with millions of user-made AI characters.

    A consumer platform for creating and chatting with AI personas — fictional characters, helpers, and roleplay companions — across web and mobile. Hosts millions of community-built characters with voice calls and image generation on the paid tier. One of the largest conversational-AI roleplay products by usage.

    Worth knowing

    Founders Shazeer and De Freitas rejoined Google in a 2024 licensing deal while the app kept running under new leadership.

    • roleplay
    • companion
    • characters
    • consumer
  • View SillyTavern details
    CompanionBYO KEYOSS

    SillyTavern

    SillyTavern

    Self-hosted LLM chat frontend for power users, with characters and many backends.

    A self-hosted, browser-based LLM frontend aimed at power users, with rich character cards, prompt control, extensions, and group chats. It runs as a local Node.js server on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android (via Termux), connecting to many backends — OpenAI, Anthropic, plus local runtimes — using your own keys. Free and AGPL-3.0 licensed with no paid tier.

    Worth knowing

    Forked from TavernAI 1.2.8 in February 2023; now an independent project with 300+ contributors.

    • open-source
    • self-hosted
    • chat
    • local
    • +1