AI romance: creating your own girlfriend with this new app is now very normal

The Digi AI Girlfriend app is a chatbot that can be personalised to the user's preferences. The provider's website advertises it as"AI Romance, reimagined", and founder Andrew Young promises a girlfriend app that “eliminates the uncanny valley, while also feeling real, human, and s***,”

Digi takes the form of an animated avatar and uses artificial intelligence to learn more about the user's preferences by chatting with them. Whether you converse with Digi in a friendly or romantic manner is at your discretion but certain services are subject to extra charges. Girlfriend apps are not a new concept. However, the design of the young lady in this app stands out from others due to its resemblance to Disney and Pixar characters. This is not a coincidence, as the avatar was designed by illustrators from Pixar studios. 

Note, though, that the graphics, the avatar's voice and the flow of speech in the application may not be as smooth and fluid as you would expect from the demo version. According to some reviews in the Play Store, there is still room for improvement. The development team has acknowledged these difficulties in a comment:

We’re a very small team and got much more traffic than we imagined we would get, very quickly. We’ve now added a bunch of GPUs, and are still adding more tonight to handle the traffic.

Despite initial difficulties, the customizable avatar is gaining popularity and is currently ranked #98 in the entertainment category on the Apple App Store, with over 10,000 downloads on the Google Play Store. On social media, people are already discussing whether Digi could soon be used to wipe out entire family trees, and the moral stance of its creators is being questioned for exploiting the social isolation of some people.