Character.AI, leading player in the virtual character market, has unveiled a new calls feature, enabling users to engage in voice conversations with their AI characters. This move intensifies the competition with rivals such as OpenAI.
The startup, co-founded by Noam Shazeer, who played a key role in developing the "transformer" AI architecture at Google, allows users to craft personalized AI companions with distinct personalities and values.
There's also an interesting rumour: Character.AI has been in talks about potential partnerships with Google, Meta, xAI, and others. The goal is to exchange patent access for computational resources. This highlights the severe shortage of affordable computing clusters, with electricity and fast GPUs in high demand globally.