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I’ve recently noticed a plethora of AI startups building around iMessage, group chats, and personal assistants.

I’m curious how useful people actually find these.

I’ve tried a few of them, and so far most of my experience has been just for fun, messing around, asking random questions, trying prompts with friends, etc. But I haven’t personally found a strong recurring use case yet. Most of my AI group chats end up dying after the initial excitement fades and I’ve tried using some of the AI chatbots but it did not really do anything.

For people who use these regularly, what are you actually doing in them? Are they helpful for work? Or do they mostly feel like a fun feature without much long-term utility? Or what could be something which could increase your convenience 2-10x, and will make these useful for you in daily usecases.

would love to hear why and what is working for you.

There a couple bots ive enjoyed all rpg style

Breeders quest forge of destinies

Starlight Academy

Isekai rpg

Problem is every app the bots are on seem to of been abandoned and no longer supported with bug fixes as developer ignores tickets. Anyone know what the current supported by developer app is.

I’m trying to find a conversational/companion-style AI that works more like a social app or chatroom — where bots can start conversations with you, or you can approach them — without having to create a character, a scenario, or a roleplay setup.

Ideally:

• Different bots with different personalities (some talkative, some quiet, some warm, some distant, with different) –
• Natural, varied conversation styles
• Not all flirty or romance-focused (Right now they are all like trying to satisfy you, not to create a NATURAL interaction)
• More like “meeting people” than “acting out a story”

Does anything like this exist? I’d love recommendations.

Tomo is an AI chat bot that talks like your friend or just an ordinary person over text like SMS. Tomo has become really sucky lately because they advertise premiums mid conversation and cut down the conversation limit so much since I started using it last year, anyone know of anything similar yet better?

Even to morbid questions? I’m not talking about self-harm of course but I would like a chatbot that answers to everything without censorship.

I recently ran a small experiment while building an AI companion called Beni (Was in beta and results are from our Tester and Early Users who agreed to provide feeback,

I was curious about something: do people open up more to AI than to real humans?

So I asked a few early users to try two things for a week:

• Talk to a friend about something personal
• Talk to the AI about the same topic

What surprised me wasn’t that people talked to the AI , it was how quickly they opened up.

A few patterns I noticed:

• People shared personal problems faster with AI
• Conversations lasted longer than typical chatbot interactions
• Many users said they felt “less judged” talking to AI
• Late-night conversations were the longest ones

It made me wonder if AI companions might become something like a thinking space rather than just a chatbot.

Curious what others think:

Do you find it easier to talk openly with AI than with real people?

ATTENTION chatbot users: I am conducting research as a part of the criteria to complete a Doctor of Education degree at Liberty University. The purpose of my research is to better understand the use of AI chatbots to deal with loneliness. To participate, you must be age 18-24, felt lonely in the past 6 months, interacted at least 5 days a week with a chatbot during that 6 month period, and live in the United States. Participants will be asked to take part in a one-on-one, audio- and video- recorded interview over Zoom, which should take about 15-30 minutes to complete. If you are interested and eligible to participate, please direct message me or email the address at the end of this post. Consent information will be provided via email at the time of the interview. [jkhinklestanley@liberty.edu](mailto:jkhinklestanley@liberty.edu)

I wrote a breakdown of OpenAI’s new Record & Replay feature for Codex, and it made me think about where chatbot tools are heading.

The core idea: instead of explaining the same workflow every time, you show Codex the process once. Codex can then turn that recording into an editable skill that can be reused later.

That is interesting because a lot of chatbot use today still depends on giving instructions over and over. Record & Replay points toward a different pattern: show the task, save the steps, review the skill, then reuse it when needed.

A few things stood out to me:

• It works best for repeatable tasks with clear steps.
• The generated skill can be inspected and edited, which is important.
• This could apply to workflows like expense reports, issue creation, time-off requests, recurring reports, or file uploads.
• Privacy is a major concern since the system can observe what is happening on screen.
• Human review still matters before trusting the result.

My main takeaway is that this is not just about chat. It is about chat-based tools becoming more capable of carrying out structured work, while still needing clear boundaries and review.

I wrote more here: https://aigptjournal.com/news-ai/record-replay-codex/

Do you think chatbot tools should move further into workflow execution?