Character.AI Leads AI Tools and Toys Gaining in the Wake of ChatGPT

ChatGPT’s phenomenal growth poses many questions about how tech giants like Microsoft and Google will respond, but it is also generating opportunities for independent AI tech companies getting carried along in the wake of OpenAI’s chatbot. The fastest-growing of these is Character.AI, where you can chat with the persona of a celebrity, fictional character, historical figure, or a personality of your own invention.

Key takeaways

• Traffic to character.ai was up 121.9% in January compared with December, almost as big a month-over-month gain as for Chat GPT (chat.openai.com), up 121.9%. However, the scale is different, with ChatGPT attracting more than 10 times as much total traffic, according to Similarweb estimates.
• Character.AI is actually way ahead of ChatGPT in user engagement — 26.5 minutes per visit, compared with 7.4 for ChatGPT.
• On a year-over-year basis, character.ai traffic was up 1,997,496% in January. We can’t cite a comparable figure for ChatGPT, which just launched at the end of November, going from zero to 616 million visits in January.
• When we get the final numbers for February, ChatGPT is likely to hit 1 billion visits, based on preliminary estimates.
• On average, over the last seven days on record, chat.openai.com attracted about 40.7 million daily visits, while the platform.openai.com website for API developers pulled in another 4.8 million daily visits – and character.ai got about 3 million daily visits.
• Other fast-growing sites related to this phenomenon include AI presentation maker tome.app (up 611% month-over-month in January), the AI search and discovery tools perplexity.ai (+174%), you.com (+153.5%), and neeva.com (+13.2%); copywriting tools neuraltext.com (+226.3%), copy.ai (+41.2% MoM), jasper.ai (+16%), and rytr.me(+13.5%). We’re stating month-over-month figures because some of these haven’t been around for a year, but for example traffic to jasper.ai was up 1,724% year-over-year.

Character.AI is a respectable #2 in the AI chat gold rush

While it currently attracts less than a tenth of the traffic of ChatGPT, Character.AI has made itself a popular destination with a playful take on AI-powered chat.

While its growth doesn’t look that impressive in comparison with ChatGPT …

… it does in comparison with the rest of the field.

How Character.AI is different

Where ChatGPT and derivative versions like the one Microsoft is baking into Bing have drawn criticism for showing too much weird personality, Character.AI bots take on fictitious, celebrity, and historical personalities by design and will answer any question in the voice of that person.

The company behind character.ai, Character Technologies Inc., was founded by Daniel De Freitas and Noam Shazeer who had previously created a powerful chatbot while working at Google that was never released – a story told in a recent Wall Street Journal article, How Google’s Caution on AI Gave Microsoft an Opening.

This is another application of the large language model style of AI processing, where the AI engine uses its analysis of enormous volumes of text to play “what word would come next in this sentence?” games with itself when constructing the response to any prompt. And just as the new AI image generators like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion can generate images “in the style of a Monet painting,” AI chatbots can imitate the language of Elon Musk or Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul’s Saul Goodman.

People appear to find this a very engaging experience, judging by minutes per visit.

The rest of the rankings

After ChatGPT and Character.AI, it’s a big step down in traffic volume before we get to the rest of the sites capitalizing on AI buzz. On the other hand, some of these are becoming established business applications helping marketing departments crank out presentations and marketing copy, with potentially better-developed business plans than the giants of AI chat.

The starting gun has just sounded in this race.

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Methodology

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Image: a robot road race by DALL-E

by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".