[Classified] Buckle Up Briefing #11: From brand mascots to brand companions.
A deep dive into live, conversational brand mascots powered by AI.
Last week, I wrote about why AI companions are becoming a thing. But what is a companion? And how do you build one?
The main difference between a ‘mascot’ and a ‘companion’ is that a companion is something you can interact with (whether driven by AI or humans, or both). Whether it’s having a conversation in your bedroom at 2 AM or high-fiving it at an event, there is something unique to this idea of a living, breathing character that sees you and engages. That’s what I want to focus on in this briefing.
A fully autonomous robot and a 2D character you puppet with keyboard shortcuts are both technically “companions.” But they’re wildly different investments with different purposes.
Let’s map this out
The Companion Grid
Two main axes to think about:
AUTONOMOUS vs HUMAN PERFORMANCE
Autonomous = AI or pre-programmed behaviors run the show
Human Performance = You (a human) are driving it in real-time
DIGITAL vs PHYSICAL
Digital = Lives on screens
Physical = Exists in meatspace
This gives you four quadrants:
Let’s break each of them down.
🤖 + 🛜 Autonomous + Digital
You have a few types of companions in this space:
LLM companions (Grok, Mico)
AI relationship apps (Tolans, Replika)
Marketing/support agents (HeyGen, Bithuman, Avatar.ai)
Almost all ‘LLMs’ are in fact some sort of assistant, but a lot of them avoid using a specific character. The sci-fi dream of ‘her’ is the north star for a lot of companies, a personalized, intimate companion that is fully tailored to your needs and wants.
There is a wide variety in this space, from just a basic ‘profile picture’ on a chatbot (static) to a fully interactive, real-time 3D companion. Most LLMs also have the option to switch to ‘voice’ mode (like GPT and Gemini), but they visualize the assistant by just animating the audio without introducing a real character.
Recently, Chat GPT released a bunch of new voices, so I think at some point most LLM’s will also think about visual, interactive avatars. For example, Microsoft recently launched Mico, their visual avatar for voice mode.
It’s a smart move, by having a relatively lightweight, morphing character, they can reduce latency a lot, and because it can ‘shapeshift’ it can easily adapt to different situations.
It’s a different route from Grok’s companions, where they opted for a variety of very distinct characters instead of a single character that can adapt to many situations. Each companion has a distinct personality and visual style.
It’s reminiscent of video gaming, where you often have to either create a fully personalized avatar (e.g. Sims), or you can pick from a set of existing characters that have distinct storylines and personalities (e.g. Mortal Kombat)
How to make one: A lot of ‘marketing agent solutions’ offer some form of virtual, real-time assistants, like HeyGen, BitHuman, and many more. I’m currently testing HeyGen and Bithuman, but both of them have too many latency issues. As soon as I have a working prototype with Marcel, I’ll share it, of course!
Why it works: Available 24/7, scales infinitely
The catch: The biggest problem here is latency (for now). Even if it’s less than 0.5 milliseconds, it makes a conversation feel ‘uncanny’. I think this is exacerbated by the fact that most of these customer support agents are trying to be ‘human’.
I think we are more forgiving towards non-human characters for the latency.
Another problem I see here is that we use these in the wrong places and at the wrong time. For example, I don’t want to have a quirky bee making jokes when I encountered a serious error with my software (this happened to me for real 😅).
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