- By Ashish Singh
- Fri, 28 Jun 2024 02:35 PM (IST)
- Source:Reuters
Character.AI, the AI-powered chatbot startup announced on Thursday that it has increased its efforts to compete with rivals like OpenAI by releasing a calls feature that lets users speak with their AI characters.
Startups have been compelled by the AI boom to update their chatbots with new features as rivals like Google, Microsoft-backed OpenAI, and Amazon.com-backed Anthropic aims to capture market share by attracting new users.
Free two-way voice calls are available on Character.AI. The app follows OpenAI's Tuesday announcement that the ChatGPT manufacturer will be delaying the release of its most recent model, the GPT-4o features, by one month.
Noam Shazeer, who co-founded Character.AI and contributed to the development of the "transformer" AI architecture at Google, which powers ChatGPT and Gemini, allows users to construct personalised AI companions with distinct personalities and values.
During its early rollout, the Menlo Park, California-based startup claimed that the new calls feature prompted over 20 million calls from over 3 million unique users, indicating a high level of engagement.
In March, Character.AI made available to all users a suite of features called Character Voice, which lets users hear characters conversing with them in one-on-one chats.
There were talks for Alphabet's Google to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Character.AI last year, according to two people briefed on the subject who spoke to Reuters.
Meanwhile, OpenAI has introduced CrticGPT which is based on the GPT-4 model that helps in finding errors in the code output produced by ChatGPT. It can write critiques which can highlight the errors in the chat model’s answers.
“We trained a model called CriticGPT to detect bugs in GPT-4's code. We are beginning to incorporate such models into our RLHF alignment pipeline to help humans supervise AI on difficult tasks,” the company wrote on X.
