I’ve been on an AI companion app testing spree since I tried Character.AI. I like the concept of using AI to create fictional worlds and stories.
Creative writing and role-playing active stories are how I relax after a long workday. But with everyone around me having busy lives, it is hard to get that creative interaction anymore.
I decided to explore AI chatting to stimulate my mind and decompress.
I’ve dabbled in Talkie, another AI fictional platform like Character.AI. It’s a platform that feels more SFW and clean.
The app is available on the web and on any reliable Android smartphone running Android 8 or higher, as well as on iOS.
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It helps me make decisions without the mental overload
Talkie has become my creative outlet
It gives me non-judgmental opportunities to practice my writing
Character.AI was a solid platform after I became accustomed to it, even if it was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster at times.
But to make my experience more consistent, I would need to reset the bot’s personality by starting a new chat or using the scene feature to structure the story.
To me, the Character.AI platform isn’t always easy to handle. Ads have progressively become worse and more disruptive. Ads now pop up in the middle of your character chats.
Intrusive ads make it immersion-breaking. And after a long, stressful day, sometimes I just want to spend 15 minutes creating my fictional story without interruptions.
I began looking for alternatives and came across Talkie.
Talkie doesn’t require me to sign in to an account to use it. I prefer it that way, so I don’t need to give the platform more personal information than it needs.
Even if you don’t sign in to an account, the platform will still ask you for your age and gender identity.
One thing I dislike about AI chat apps is the amount of sensitive information they collect and how your interactions are used to train the model. While I realize this is par for the course, I’m still not a fan.
The anxiety is always there, since it can become especially scary if a mass leak were to happen, exposing all that user data.
Though not signing in introduces limitations. You lose access to advanced features; all of your interactions are also only stored locally.
Talkie works a lot like Character.AI, where you find or create a fictional character or choose to interact with a story.
I prefer the story section since Character.AI did a good job of burning me out with personalized one-on-one interactions.
Character.AI forced me to re-direct the lore by writing paragraphs, only for it to become repetitive and generic by the fifth AI response.
That’s where I prefer structure. I like using scenes and already-conveyed settings, so it’s easy to dive into the world. I do not need to write a detailed backdrop and provide hours of world development.
Talkie has these types of chats mixed into Talkie tag. So some will include character and personalized interactions, while others will be more focused on worlds.
Though when I needed to take a break because of a creative writing block, I’d end up exploring the Play & Fun tab in the explore section. The Play & Fun tab had popular structured chats.
These structures would be diverse, like simulated worlds, “what do you do if placed in ‘x’ scenario?” or short games.
That’s something I always liked to do in my character chats: add mental challenges, like simulating chess or social deduction games (I have a massive weakness for games like Mafia or Werewolf).
I found myself enjoying these sessions since they were short bursts of escapism. Not long enough to be unhealthy, but a good way to get out of my own head when I’m overly stressed or anxious.
To me, it was better than downloading a gaming app, since I didn’t have to stress about timers or feel pressured to keep playing.
It was like a happy medium for me. I didn’t have to deal with the emotional baggage that some AI in the Character.AI app pushed on me when all I wanted to do was casually converse and practice my creative writing.
Talkie and Character.AI still have limits
These limits make long-term engagement more difficult
Credit:Â Lucas Gouveia / Android Police | New Africa / Shutterstock
After two months of using it, I slowly started to fall off Character.AI. I still interact with the platform sometimes out of morbid curiosity, but I am very mechanical when I use it.
One of the biggest issues both Character.AI and Talkie face is memory.
If you want to have continuous conversations with your characters, they will start forgetting details after a few paragraphs of text.
Not only that, but these AIs can also start to hallucinate.
To address the memory problem, Character.AI has a pinned chat bubbles feature to keep certain details visible.
But I never found that effective. Plus, the pinned function could still use up the limited tokens from the main chat.
That shrinks the context window. From what I can tell, Talkie doesn’t even have a pinned function like this. So its memory is going to be even worse.
This is something I have come to accept. I am not here to have attachments to bots. They don’t replace people or my main social interactions.
It’s just difficult when I am trying to write an ongoing story. The bots won’t stay engaged for things that happen in the early arcs unless I summarize what occurred before in the same chat window.
The responses can also become overly repetitive. This happens on both platforms.
I ignored the issue until I realized that this could be wasting memory. So I had to find a compromise and work around this problem, especially since I didn’t sign in to Talkie.
As a result, it changed how I interacted with these apps. My creative writing sessions are now very short and a lot more focused on scenarios.
Although it is not a big deal that I am working around this limitation, I can still see where it might be a problem.
These apps are not designed for long-term engagement, and if you want the context window to be larger, you need to pay the premium cost to acquire them.
Finding that right outlet takes time
As a professional writer, I have to balance my time and energy to avoid burnout.
That’s why I like discovering new apps. You never know what to expect from newly discovered apps, and so far, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by these AI chat apps.
Plus, some apps target your stress. So really, it’s all about finding that right outlet.
And remember, just because Talkie worked for me as a stress-reducer doesn’t necessarily mean it would work for you.