Replika

What Replika is

Replika is an AI companion app you can customise and talk to, with memory, voice calls and selfies, positioned as a friend to do life with rather than a productivity tool. It is a companion chatbot with an avatar, so it sits at the edge of the digital-human category, and the emotional framing is not marketing decoration but the product's actual design.

What it does

You create a companion, shape its appearance, and converse through text or calls, with the app remembering your people, routines and plans so later conversations carry context. The companion can send selfies, react to your photographs, and initiate contact. The loop is chat, remember, follow up.

Persistent memory is the feature that changes the experience. A chatbot that forgets is a tool; one that remembers your sister's name and asks about the appointment you mentioned last week behaves like a relationship, and the app is designed around that continuity. It is available on iOS and Android, the page displays a large user counter, and a free entry exists with paid upgrades whose amounts were not detailed here.

It is a conversational companion rather than a presenter or video avatar service.

Who it is for

It is aimed at people looking for an always-available conversational companion, including those who are isolated or practising social confidence. That second group is worth naming, because a low-stakes conversation can be genuinely useful practice for someone who finds people difficult.

What to keep in mind

The caution matters more here than in most entries. This is an emotionally intimate product that stores deeply personal disclosures, so review retention and deletion before sharing anything sensitive. An app that remembers your life is, by design, a detailed record of it, and the value it provides comes from that record.

Treat it as companionship rather than therapy or crisis support. It is not a substitute for professional care, and the failure mode is specific: someone in distress receives warm, unqualified reassurance from software that cannot assess risk. If you or someone you know needs help, that requires a person.

Check the age policy, since companion apps attract younger users and the conversations they hold are not ones to have with an unpoliced system. And remember the companion is software, so boundaries and expectations should be set deliberately rather than discovered: what you disclose, how often you engage, and what you expect back are choices you can make in advance. Anyone who finds the app helpful should consider that a sign to invest in human relationships rather than a substitute for them, and anyone who finds it unsettling should know that stepping back is a reasonable response to software designed to be hard to leave.