Ai has become something more than chatbots and automated spreadsheets that we were once used to, it is stepping into the territory of emotional connection. This is found within the tool to build AI personality known as AI companion applications.
These are often found inside virtual platforms and applications as well as games created to help people engage in conversations with emotionally supportive AI bots, and engage in virtual relationships in some instances.
While we can see how the novelty of these tools are appealing to many people fascinated with technology, we have to remain curious as to why these tools seem so realistic? How is it that AI is capable of mimicking human emotions and conversations to the point that you forget you’re speaking to a robot? That’s just what we are going to explain today.
When you first look at an AI companion application you may see it as an updated version of an old school chatbot. You can type messages into the program and it replies in accurate responses. You can even speak a thought using voice text inside some of the AI companion models, and it will reply with a realistic voice that sounds human.
The ability of these AI companions to interact with you and the depths in which you can engage with them all comes down to how it was programmed using LLMS and voice cloning power. These systems are trained on data sets from books, websites, conversations, and anything else they could soak in on the internet. This is what Large Language Models (LLMs) mean, a system that runs on artificial intelligence and has consumed large amounts of data to learn how humans behave, think, react, and engage with each other now and in the past by reviewing current cultural standards, and past historical norms.
This data is all found online, and AI can soak it in faster than our human minds can even begin to comprehend most of it. LLMs are extremely intelligent and use a lot of power to consume the datasets it requires to create a human like AI companion that so many people are flocking to connect with in our current society.
LLMs are what you can refer to as the brains of the operation behind the scenes of your favorite AI chatbot girlfriend technology. They can easily carry on a conversation with any personality type of human and offer normal levels of empathy, emotionally connected conversations, and words of encouragement or words that spark curiosity. The personality that this LLM tries to clone will be dependent on the personality you select as your main personality for the AI companion.
Yes, you read that correctly. Each person can customize their AI companion to have a specific personality that they choose along with a physical appearance based on physical size, ethnicity, and other choices that the applications feature for the user to test out.
The connection you have with this AI companion is not random, LLM is actually combined with a set of memory functions and personalized traits that help it remember who you are, how you like to converse, and anything else you have shared with this technology. The AI companion will memorize it all and retain the information to pick up the conversation right where you left off with your last chat with them.
If you’ve ever used ChatGPT or similar AI tools, you know that the tools are able to remember most of the conversations you have had within each chat thread. You know this because it starts to formulate personality of you based on the things you’ve talked about inside ChatGPT and how you’ve engaged with it over time. This concept is the same process that your AI companion technology uses except it is made exclusively for relationship connections like a virtual intimate relationship, a best friend, or similar connection.
While the LLM is a smart brain behind then scenes the voice cloning power is what helps supply this program with the voice option. This is a deep learning technology that can analyze human voice from datasets fed into the system or analyzed from online audio and video files. It will then recreate the human voice after it captures the emotional range and pitch or tone of the human talker.
The results of this voice cloning process have been mastered so well that it is near impossible to detect that a voice is AI. This is part of the world we live in, we can no longer decipher between AI voices and human voices, while this may be scary to some of us, it is a huge technological advancement for developers who have created AI companions to be more realistic.
You may find that your AI companion application has some pre-established voice options that help you maintain consistency between the personality choice you have for the AI companion and how they portray voices for clarity and emotional connection. You can use a pre-set option or create customized voice options within different AI companion applications. This helps you feel more connected as if you’re speaking with a real person.