In the past two years, the field of AI has entered an era of vigorous development, with various applications in vogue, such as AI+games, AI+social, and AI+education. AI products are occupying the market with a diversified development momentum.
Among many AI products, AI+social has become a hot track. Its characteristics are very obvious, providing cost-effective real-time companionship through AI to meet the spiritual needs of users. Some of the bigger players in this market are the AI chatbot application Character.ai and the AI social application Talkie. The former was launched in September 2022. Five months later, users sent more than 2 billion messages, and active users spent an average of more than 2 hours a day interacting with AI. The DAU at its peak was about 5 million. Talkie is a multimodal AI social application launched by MiniMax, a domestic large model company, in June 2023, and its current DAU has exceeded 1 million.
Discover Linky AI: Personalized Character Creation and Interactive Features
Recently, the author discovered another AI social application called Linky: Chat with Characters AI (hereinafter referred to as "Linky AI"), which was launched in July 2023 and entered the top 5 of the US Google Play free list in late April this year. The cumulative downloads have exceeded 2 million.
Linky AI was developed and released to overseas markets by Kunlun Wanwei, using its own large language model "Tiangong" series. In terms of use, Linky's mode is similar to Talkie, supporting players to build their own virtual characters for interaction, and they can also chat with characters created by other users. This mode is derived from Character.ai mentioned above, but the difference is that there are not too many big IPs on Linky, and almost all of them are completely customized by users.
The customization threshold of Linky is relatively low. Users only need to enter their names and select their genders to generate a new virtual character. In addition, if users choose the personalized mode, they can also provide reference pictures and picture descriptions to help better generate characters. However, compared with Talkie, Linky's creation mode lacks some refinement. Talkie can not only generate virtual characters through pictures and descriptions but also customize the character's voice, background story, and skin.
But Linky AI also has some highlights, such as adding a personalized recommendation tag, which will recommend virtual characters based on user tags, and adding a story mode, where users can continue to talk with the characters according to a story plot. Of course, they can also delete the previous conversation and start again.
Currently, Linky only supports text answers during the conversation with the character, but the text will add some descriptions of the character's inner activities or behaviors, which can help users understand the character's psychology and make the conversation smoother. At present, this application is basically a virtual character of boyfriends and girlfriends, with different personalities, which can meet users with different spiritual needs. It can be said that the main feature is companionship. In addition, Linky AI also adds a Gacha mechanism, and sets up three different types of magic cards, and users have one chance to edit the card information. However, Linky enforces relatively strict content moderation, making it impossible for users to fully experience unrestricted, in-depth role-playing. In terms of monetization mechanism, Linky AI supports a subscription model: $9.99 per month and $89.99 for an annual card. In the app, you can directly charge coins to draw cards. The price for every 10 draws is about 15 US dollars. At present, no advertising monetization form has been found.
According to the data query, Linky's cumulative revenue is only about 110,000 US dollars, which also reflects the problem that Linky's current monetization ability is relatively monotonous. However, considering the unique advantages of the potential audience breadth and user stickiness of the AI+ social track, Linky may see an increase in revenue after adding advertising monetization. According to information from Guangda, Linky did not buy a large amount of volume. In April 2024, the monthly download volume reached 1.4 million times, which may all come from the fission effect between users.
Why Tipsy Chat Is the Ultimate Choice for Personalized, Unrestricted AI Conversations
A big problem faced by AI companion products like Character AI, Talkie, and Linky is that although they are emotional companion products, they prohibit most NSFW content. This makes the characters, which should be smart, interesting, and emotionally rich, become boring. The user experience feels distorted, dull, and lacks immersion. This type of restriction has led to many complaints from users of the largest AI chat app, Character AI, because the AI emotional companion without NSFW content seems to have lost its vitality. The emergence of this new demand has led to some new trending apps that have made improvements and supplements by providing NSFW content and strengthening model memory and fun, such as Tipsychat.
Compared to traditional products like Linky, Tipsy Chat fully supports NSFW content and introduces the world's best role-playing AI model. It can easily find SFW and NSFW characters for role-playing according to the user's current preferences and mood in the settings. You can also choose the style, length, and temperature of the conversation. These personalized settings make each character more unique and vivid. In addition, Tipsy Chat has a stunning large-screen character display and immersive chat experience, which makes it stand out from other products in terms of attention to detail. Finally, the quality of the plot text and characters is also higher than Linky. The speed of development in this industry has made the early major SFW chatbot apps like Linky face great survival challenges.
What's Next for Gaming and AI Integration?
Despite the challenges from emerging AI chat players, games are one of Linky's provider Kunlun Wanwei's main businesses. Kunlun Wanwei was founded in 2008. In the early years, it started with web games and later released games such as "Kunlun World," "Beauty Dream Factory," and "Wuxia Fengyun." Around 2012, it began to lay out the mobile game business and opened the road to overseas markets. It is one of the game manufacturers that entered the overseas market earlier in China. In 2018, the overseas distribution brand GameArk was officially launched, further expanding the scope of overseas business.
In 2022, AIGC emerged, and Kunlun Wanwei caught up with the early train in the domestic AI field, formulated the strategy of "All in AGI and AIGC," and fully embraced AIGC. In 2023, the large language model "Tiangong" developed by Kunlun Wanwei started internal testing, and the 3.0 version has been launched, providing AI writing, image generation, translation, travel planning, programming, and other functions. In addition, Tiangong AI also launched AI Agent, which lists multiple smart channels on the official website for users to choose from, and users can interact with them.
According to domestic media reports, in the ranking of domestic MoE models, Kunlun Wanwei's Tiangong has already ascended to the first place, with ByteDance's Doubao and Minimax's ABAB large model ranking second and third, respectively.
In addition, Kunlun Wanwei also launched an AI+UGC game Club Koala in 2023, which is a UGC game platform similar to Roblox. This game debuted at the Cologne Game Show in Germany last year and was a big hit.
The main gameplay of Club Koala is Home Island, where players can create their own virtual images on their own islands, build and decorate their own islands and houses. You can also share and download other players' island outfits with one click through Blue Map, participate in interesting activities such as planting, fishing, cooking, and visit each other with friends to form an active player simulation community. Through AI-enabled UGC content, a game editor called "Koala Editor" is added to the game, where players can customize levels and make mini-games, increasing the player's experience in creativity.
In addition, Club Koala also introduces AI NPCs with self-awareness and self-action. These NPCs will independently set schedules and execute them, and respond to sudden behaviors. They will also act according to their own personality, characteristics, wishes, and memories, and will affect each other's relationship and development.
In the wave of AI, almost all Internet technology companies are recruiting and deploying their own AI strategies. For Kunlun Wanwei, with its self-developed large model, it has made achievements in games and applications and is at the forefront of the domestic AI field. In the overseas market, Kunlun Wanwei has also accumulated rich experience in game development. With the support of its self-developed large model, it may achieve greater success in the future.
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