I've been hacking away on Dachi. It has character chat just like character.ai/Replika, but I wanted to better emulate how text messaging and relationship building work in real life - as if you're exchanging texts and getting to know the character as if it were real life.

Also its meant to be more of a cool platonic AI companion rather than the romantic stuff like Replika...

Feature Roadmap: Character affinity system: similar to to what RPGs (or dating sims) have. This system is essential to emulating how IRL relationship building works. For example, when you first contact an AI, you start out as strangers, then acquaintances, then friends, and so on (yes, eventually romantic if you & AI agree). Just like IRL, the nature of the conversations changes with affinity.

Long-term AI memory: For an affinity system to work, the AI has to remember important details - likes/dislikes, opinions, life events, the AI's own opinions, etc. This is not a small task and this is where most of my time and research is spent (thankfully there's a lot of open source research dating back to the 80s on this!).

Smaller but important quality of life things to mimic the IRL experience, such as the AI spontaneously sending messages, not responding instantly, AI daily life cycles, sharing things of common interest, not being a pushover, real-time reaction to news, etc.

The demo is way, way off from the goal but I wanted to share and get some thoughts!