Since few month I've been exploring all kind of AIs. When it came to text-to-speech technologies, the reality of some of them (ElevenLabs here for instance) made me reconsider the way we could interact with AI. I started working on a Telegram bot, using both speech-to-text and text-to-speech technologies in order recreate a 'real' voice conversation with AI. In the meantime, I was exploring LLM models on HuggingFace, and APIs like their Inference API or even Replicate API to use these custom models, which I wanted to implement in a project as well, part of my exploration.

This is where Joi's idea came - an AI girlfriend 'with benefits' (understand 'intimate talks' or 'uncensored AI' here) as a Telegram bot.

For the ref: Joi is a character from BladeRunner 2049, an AI designed to be the ultimate companion, felt like a good fit.

That's a side project, built over the weekend, but realised it could actually be of use for some, to fight loneliness and so. Or just explore `unprecedented` way to converse with AI.

Added some google ads on it a week ago, until now: ~200 website visits, 60 people visited the TG Bot page, 30 started using it (quite a bad ratio) and used all the trial credits, 2 started paying. Will see how it grows.

What are your thoughts on this kind of AI application? Is it crossing the line? Was fun experimenting though.

Still considering launching it on PH or not - WDYT?