Character.AI
Chat platform with millions of user-created AI characters for roleplay, companionship, and fandom.
About
Character.AI is a conversational platform where users chat with millions of user-created AI characters, from fictional personas and historical figures to original creations. Founded in 2021 by former Google AI engineers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, it launched publicly in 2022 and grew into one of the largest consumer AI products, reporting around 20 million monthly active users and over 18 million created characters. Its audience skews young, with deep engagement around fandom roleplay, study companions, and always-on social characters.
The platform supports chat, voice calls (Character Calls, launched June 2024), and memory features that keep long conversations coherent. In September 2024 Google signed a reported $2.7B licensing deal and rehired co-founder Shazeer, while Karandeep Anand took over as CEO. The company has faced serious scrutiny over youth safety, including wrongful-death lawsuits, and announced that under-18 chat access would be cut over by November 2025 with age verification enforcement. It remains the dominant player in user-generated conversational characters.
What it can do
- Chat with millions of community-created characters
- Character Calls voice conversations
- Character creation tools with personality definition
- Memory for long-running conversations
- Mobile and web apps
Setup
Sign up free on the web or mobile app; browse or create characters and start chatting.
Prerequisites
An account; 18+ for full chat access under the 2025 policy.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 9/10
Scored 9/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: Verified via vendor site/docs/GitHub and reputable coverage, wave 75; Trending score 90/100 from researcher assessment.
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.