Does it have to be explicitly marketed as a romantic/sexual companion? Would a personal-secretary-who-also-laughs-at-all-your-jokes-while-politely-declining-advances resolve as true? Because I think Siri etc are all headed that way, more illusion-of-social-companionship

@Adam Great question.

It could still be marketed as a platonic companion since I mentioned friend in the title.

The line between friend & personal assistant is tricky & I think you’re right about things heading that way.

Something like Siri would be sort of cheating imo (which is why I mentioned Discord and WhatsApp in the description) as they’ve already got massive userbases

I’m leaning towards no if it’s a personal assistant as what I’m hoping to figure out is:

1. Can a new companion platform have that kind of user growth starting from scratch

2. Would that many people ever use something that is explicitly marketed as a companion app

If it’s a personal assistant then many of the users may just be using it to enhance their productivity so it detracts from point no 2.

Sounds like too many too quickly, since this is an extremely taboo topic in general

@AntonBogun fair point, however one could argue that that's less of an issue given it could be used privately & that other things (e.g. pornography) are taboo yet popular.

many of the most widely used applications center around hijacking evolutionarily adapted traits. 500 Million is a lot, but Replika being at 10 Million already is pretty remarkable when, imo, it's fairly primitive. It's likely that within 10 years hallucinations decrease + fidelity (video, speech, 3D models), latency, personalization & coherence increase . But ye, the 'ick' factor does seem like the biggest hurdle.