Character.AI, the hugely popular digital avatar startup, announced Thursday that users will now be able to hold real-time conversations with one of the company’s multitude of AI agents by placing a free, fictionalized Character Call on the app.
The company has been building intelligent chatbots designed to engage users in interactive conversations since the company’s founding in 2021. Initially, users could only interact with these characters as one would any other chatbot like Gemini or Claude, doing so via text. That changed in March 2024, when the company unveiled Character Voice, a suite of free tools including a library of more than a million AI-generated vocals built both by the Character.ai team and its user community, which allowed users to speak with their selected avatars in one-on-one conversations.
Thursday’s announcement streamlines the process of initiating a conversation. Using the Character.AI app, users simply place a call to their preferred avatar. While Character Voice was initially only available in English, avatars on Character Call can speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, “and many more” languages, according to the company. Character.AI envisions people using this feature for a variety of tasks (non-explicit, of course), from practicing a foreign language to getting their spiel down for an upcoming job interview to gaining confidence for a stressful social interaction — even adding an AI-generated party member to their next D&D campaign.
Unfortunately, we won’t likely see a return of the party lines that were popular in the 1970s, as the company recently removed its group chat room feature from the web-based version. There is, however, a simple workaround if you’d still like to try it for yourself.
In 1950, Alan Turing asked whether machines can think. Rather than argue over definitions, he turned the question into a party game, where an interrogator trades typed messages with hidden players and tries to work out who is who. Since then, chatbots have gotten so good that they have already fooled humans in modern versions of the test.
So, four researchers from Paris Cité University asked the obvious follow-up question in a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports: can AI at least catch its own kind?
Mozilla is giving Firefox’s Smart Window two new tricks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Smart Window is an optional AI mode in Firefox with a built-in chat that helps you get things done while you browse. With this update, it can fill out online forms using details from your tabs and keep an eye on websites for you.
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The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.