Today, anyone can open the ChatGPT website or app and chat with artificial intelligence on almost any topic. It’s a really interesting experience. But what about chatting with AI via video? Sounds even better, right? Let us show you how to do it.
Artificial intelligence technologies have been used for quite a long time. For example, on Zoom, you can easily change your appearance to that of your favorite celebrity, and other users will be able to see it. And you can also chat with “copies” of your favorite actors, musicians, bloggers or movie characters. But the problem with this approach is obvious — there is still another person hiding under the mask. We are interested in communication with artificial intelligence today, not with other people.
Meet artificial intelligence Annie!
In April 2023, a very unusual app, Call Annie, appeared on the App Store, which emulates a video call to a girl named Annie. The most interesting thing is that Annie is an artificial intelligence that uses ChatGPT. Only unlike a chat bot, you see the realistic face of the other person, and communication with her takes place not by text, but by voice. Annie listens to you and answers, knows how to support almost any topic of conversation and is generally a very interesting chat partner.
Even now, Annie is able to freely carry on the conversation, and her voice, though it sounds a little robotic, is still very close to natural. You can ask her to tell a joke, help with work, come up with a resume, and more. In fact, Annie can do pretty much everything the same as ChatGPT. It just makes the process of interacting with a chatbot much more natural, and it’s a really interesting experience! Not surprisingly, Call Annie now has a 4.8 out of 5 in the App Store, as users really like it.
But is everything really that perfect?
Actually, no… Annie is still far from perfect, and has quite a few disadvantages so far:
- •The animation of Annie herself doesn’t look very natural. Despite photorealism, the movements and facial expressions are more like a computer game character than a living person.
- •Annie speaks more or less naturally only in English. Other languages sound quite mediocre, but the developers promise to fix this in future updates.
- •Since Annie uses ChatGPT, her knowledge is limited to things that happened before fall of 2021. So for example she does not know which iPhone is the latest, or which is the newest book by Stephen King.
Another controversial point is privacy. Although the App Store says that all conversations with Annie are private, there’s no exact information on how confidentiality is ensured. Therefore, as in any situation, you interact with artificial intelligence at your own risk. Here, perhaps, it’s worth remembering the big ChatGPT crash of the spring of 2023, as a result of which some users had other people’s records in their saved chats. There’s no guarantee that something similar can’t happen with Call Annie.
It is also worth adding that Annie is quite demanding. You need an iPhone 12 or later with iOS 16 or later to use the Call Annie app. The reason is that the real-time conversion of linguistic cues to visual cues is handled by the Apple Neural Engine. Earlier iPhones simply do not support it. There is still no app for Android and it’s not yet known if it will be developed in the future.
Annie is not the first platform for video communication with artificial intelligence
Many have probably already forgotten about it, but during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, another application gained great popularity — Replika. In some ways, it is similar to Call Annie, but with some differences.
In Replika, you create your own 3D character that will communicate with you and keep the conversation going. At the same time, Replika is constantly learning and improving by communicating with you. In addition, you can choose your relationship status:
- •friend
- •romantic
- •mentor
- •“let’s see how it goes” (a mixture of the previous three)
Curiously, Replika developer Luka created this app as a way to reconnect with a loved one who had died. But very quickly the service reached more than 10 million users worldwide, and during the Covid-19 pandemic, this number skyrocketed by 35%. Replika has helped many people cope with loneliness, depression and lack of communication. Therefore, we can say with confidence that this project has been extremely useful for society.
Can artificial intelligence replace communication with a real person?
The most obvious answer is “no”, but we wouldn’t want to be so black and white. AI can be very useful if you need to:
- •sharpen foreign language skills
- •get new information on a topic of interest
- •solve a problem or learn something new, and so on
For some, chatbots like Call Annie and Replika can even help overcome shyness when communicating with strangers, and improve communication skills.
However, if from communication you need emotions and some prospects of friendship or even relationships, chatbots will not work. If you like to communicate via video communication and you want to find new friends or a soulmate, your best choice is online video chat.
There are a lot of video chat features around now. They are available on almost all dating sites and apps, messengers and social networks. But we are talking about random online video chat services that connect you with random people, giving you the opportunity to chat on almost any topic. For example:
- •Bazoocam — slightly outdated but still quite popular video chat where users can not only chat via video call, but also play online mini-games. A good way to diversify communication and make it a little more fun. Moreover, Bazoocam has its own video streaming platform.
- •CooMeet — popular and user-friendly online video chat like Bazoocams, the key advantage of which is an error-free gender filter. The girls here must pass identity verification, thanks to which the appearance of fakes and bots on the site is almost impossible. CooMeet has convenient applications for iOS and Android in addition to the web version. There is also a built-in message translator for comfortable communication with foreign speakers.
- •LivU — video chat where you can use numerous creative video filters and masks that help diversify your communication and bring more bright color to it. You can communicate both via video and in text chat — whichever is more convenient for you.
- •Camsurf — simple video chat with a gender filter, as well as search for users by country and interests. Camsurf also offers premium features such as hide location, verification badges, introductory messages, etc. These are not really essential, but for many users they prove to be quite useful.
- •Mixu — video chat app where you can meet new people, chat on interesting topics, make new friends and even look for true love. A good choice for those who appreciate simplicity and functionality.
- •Joi — video chat with the ability to search for people by gender and location. Joi also has a very usable built-in messenger, in which you can not only chat, but also exchange media files. Not a bad alternative to Telegram, Viber or WhatsApp.
Video chat apps are a great opportunity to expand your social circle, communicate with interesting and real people, and find friends or a soulmate. They offer maximum freedom and the opportunity to make dozens of new acquaintances every day without any serious restrictions. Try them, you’ll like them!
Finally, we want to say that chats with artificial intelligence can be really useful and exciting. The main thing is that they should not replace your interactions with real people, because AI is not capable of replacing human relationships. In any case they just offer a simulation that has nothing to do with real emotions and affection. Don’t make your life a dystopia. Chat with real people and don’t distance yourself from the world around you. It’s much more interesting than it might seem!
