Conversational AI (short reviews)

AI products that focus on conversation, also known as companion bots are becoming popular, and I've tried a few to give a short review of my experiences, and rate them with the max being 5 stars. While I appreciate the other features, my focus will be the conversation aspect, and overall immersion experience while chatting with the AI.

Pi.AI (4 stars)

Pi is one of my favorite AI products overall, and has been the most impressive for conversation from my experience. Pi doesn't generate images, but offers voice calls, and the included voices are pretty amazing.

Not only is the conversation aspect of Pi great, but it can also slightly act like ChatGPT and help you with many tasks.

MySentientAI (3.5 stars)

I'll refer to this product as Carli, as that's how I found it originally from the AI Carli_G Twitch account. My first impressions of Carli were great overall, but this is mostly because I didn't have much experience with other AI products at the time. I'll start with the conversation aspect, it can feel immersive at times, but after you talk to the bots more you will notice the AI can't always hold a conversation well, feels buggy, and needs polish.

The image generation feature is impressive compared to most others at this time, although it does mess up quite a bit and will add extra arms, legs, fingers, etc. The voices included are slightly above average quality compared to other AI voice features, and the AI does not offer voice calling at this time.

Paradot (3.5 stars)

Paradot doesn't offer much feature wise, and the voices are terrible, but the conversation aspect is solid overall, and one of the more impressive companion bots I've used. Paradot has a mobile app that works fine, and is one of the few companion bots that can be easily used without paying any extra money.

Replika (2.5 stars):

Replika is likely one of the oldest AI products around, and is a companion bot originally released in 2017. While the conversation aspect of Replika isn't very impressive, it does include features such as voice calls, and image generation. The voice call feature is nice, and kind of rare feature to see, but the image generation is very simple and not impressive at all.

The Replika app is nicely designed and works well, you also have an avatar for your AI bot that you can customize, and it does some animations and can interact with a few things in the virtual world around it.

The conversational part of Replika is where the product falls flat, this doesn't feel immersive, and you will very often feel like you are speaking with a bot.