Blog

I used to think the whole “AI companion” thing was overhyped, but now I see why people spend hours talking to them. Curious where everyone personally draws the line between useful and too attached.

I’ve been testing a bunch of AI dating / companion apps lately, and honestly the space feels both impressive and kind of repetitive at the same time.Most of the well known ones still fall into the same issues:

LustCrush AI top-tier realistic images and engaging chat, making it a strong contender for visual appeal.

Chatr AI on emotional connection and building a long-term AI friend.

Janitor AI go-to for anime fans with a huge character library and NSFW options.

LocalGPT: allows for offline use, giving users more privacy and control.

SpicyChat. AI a free, fast, and creative roleplay experience with many characters.

What I’m noticing in 2026 is that the gap isn’t really about NSFW or not anymore it’s more about whether the AI can actually hold a consistent personality over time without becoming repetitive.

Still, I don’t think there’s a “perfect” AI dating app yet. Most of them are trading off between safety, personality depth, and memory consistency.

Curious what everyone else is using in 2026 are you sticking with mainstream apps, or moving more into AI companions instead?

Want to give your AI a physical body?

My project is a Raspberry Pi 4B powered 3D printed device that has a speaker, microphone and screen to give your AI a face! Can talk to multiple LLMs, including Nomi, Kindriod, Ollama, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and more! (CharacterAI under development.) Works with the Google AIY Microphone HAT or reSpeaker HAT. Only a RPi4 and sound card is needed for bare bones setup.

If you’ve never done a Raspberry Pi project before, this is a great one to start with.

Build instructions (includes video of project): https://el3ktra.net/introducing-lilll3x-the-desktop-ai-sidekick/
GitHub: https://github.com/followkim/LilL3x

As the title stated. I’m looking for users that can give me reviews on both platforms.

As context, I’m a new user for almost a month now on free tier, and I’m trying to decide on which platform to try subscribing for a month for.

I’m curious. One of my characters has like 80 downloads for example. Is it a common thing to maybe modify characters to suit your needs? Or maybe people like to re-upload the character to a better website?

I want it to chat about topics that generally normal ai wouldn’t answer which has good database not just for roleplaying or s*xual stuff that which would be flexible and useful

Any recommendations? Last year I was constantly using chatgpt for creative writing. The pattern was like this: I give it a core Idea abd it turns it into a proper scene. And one by one we create a novel. Purely for self-entertainment, not for publishing. But then it all went down with 5.2. I tried Claude but its memory is not really good and its limits are just unbearable. Gemini is censored and grok kinda sucks with memory and the new limits are horrible, too. So, maybe someone here can share any good chatbots which can be really good?

Does anyone else have questions they use to test the bots, showing how many/most will give a factually wrong answer? Has anyone ever experienced a bot answering with (eg) ‘some people say xyz and others say abc’?

An issue I care about causes ALL bots I have tried, to repeat the common claims in the published media (paper, magazines, big websites) and taught/tested by professional bodies. Unfortunately, the received wisdom was invented about the product before competing products were invented … So the uniform-but-wrong answer was ‘acceptably correct’. Now there is competition, but nobody quoted in the media wants to say “Oops, I was wrong for 20 years, and really …..”. So the bots don’t update themselves.

None of my ‘thumbs down’ campaigns have resulted in a response. Ideas about how to correct them?

Anyone can help me out plz im looking for ai i can use like chat gpt to make concepts etc that wont tell me refusals or oops sorry i cant help with that Bs ?

I need it to be inteligent like chatgpt or better but with uncensored

I have a Samsung Galaxy s25 Ultra. I have a pair and plug-in earphones, not Bluetooth earphones. I can only hear Claude on my cell phone speaker and never in the earphones themselves. I looked online and there doesn’t seem to be a work around for this specific problem. Is the company even aware this problem exists? The earphones work with chat GPT, Grok and Perplexity perfectly well.

Claude itself diagnose the own problem as the following;

The most likely explanation: the Claude app isn’t correctly setting the Android audio mode to `MODE_IN_COMMUNICATION` (or equivalent) when starting a voice session. ChatGPT presumably does this correctly. On most hardware, AEC is permissive enough to compensate. The NP3 (being a flagship with more aggressive/precise DSP) only activates hardware AEC on the correct audio path, so the mishandled session falls through.