Global AI Character Trends that Matter Now, Part 1

It's no longer just about people connecting with people.

It's about people connecting with digital characters powered by AI, and we call them AI characters.

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Hello, I’m Lan, a Solution Architect from BytePlus, the enterprise service arm of Bytedance.

Today I want to talk about a new form of social interaction that’s quietly emerging. It’s no longer just about people connecting with people—it’s about people connecting with digital characters powered by AI.

We call them AI Characters.

And this shift is creating not only new ways of interaction, but also entirely new business models.

Why now?

three things have really come together in just the last two years.

First, advances in large language models, text-to-speech, and multimodal AI have made characters feel more lifelike than ever.

Second, cultural habits—like roleplay and fan-driven storytelling—have found a natural home in these AI experiences.

And third, product design has turned this into a flywheel.

Short term and long term memory consistent to character traits and even emotional continuities.

You this don't see this as code anymore.

They see them as companions or to come back to next to the market to momentum.

This is no longer a niche.

I'll give you some examples.

Character AI it went from launch to over 20 million monthly active users worldwide, and in 2025, it's estimated to generate around, setting $2.2 million in revenue.

Replika it stay near the top of social app revenue charts for yes.

Hoping that digital companionship isn't just a passing trend.

Take Talkie AI Your AI example is a proof that even newcomers in the market can rise fast.

In the US, it's dollars actually has a character AI in some period all together.

Global consumer spend on and I have to apps have already reached $221 million as of July 2025, up about 64% year over year.

This makes one thing very clear AI characters are become real, sustainable business, not just experiments.

Who is using it?

Data from Sensor Tower shows that in top I have to ask users aged 18 to 35 make up a major share of the base.

In addition, other figures report that in companion app category, 18 to 24 year old alone can count for around 65% of users.

As for gender, some apps (like Character AI, Talkie AI) tend to see higher adoption among female users, though this differs by platform.

These users aren’t simply “using an app.”

What they’re really doing is building a new kind of social experience.

They express themselves through the characters they shape, and sometimes those creations live on for others to use as well.

For a new generation, AI characters are becoming a way to connect, to create, and to show who they are.

Next, big players and the small players alike.

What's really interesting about this market is that size doesn't always decide the success.

Even very small teams—sometimes fewer than ten people—have built apps that thrive, because their products drive large session depth and high retention.

That kind of intense engagement can make lean teams surprisingly competitive.

But this isn’t just a startup story.

Larger companies have their own advantages: existing traffic, strong IP, and loyal communities.

By introducing AI Characters, they can reimagine their audiences with new interaction models—boosting retention, unlocking new revenue streams, and differentiating their products in ways that smaller teams can’t.

So whether you are a startup or an established platform, the opportunity is real and the playbook is wide open.

Multi-Modal memory monetization text based chat is just a starting point.

Today, I characters are becoming richer and more immersive.

Voice interaction makes conversation feel alive.

Image and video generation bring characters into a visual world.

Music sets a vibe and it gives emotional depth.

And it's not only about how characters look and sound.

It's also about how they remember what's short term memory.

Conversations feel more coherent in the moment with long term memory.

Relationships can carry over days, weeks, or even months, so users feel the continuity, not just a one off conversation.

Put together, multimodality and memory are what transform “a chatbot” into “a character.”

And that transformation is exactly what unlocks the new business models.

Subscriptions, premium voices, skin storylines, IP collaborations, and more.

Well, BytePlus fits in Of course, getting all of this to work at scale is not easy.

It requires balancing dialog quality, multimodal input output, cost efficiency, and safety.

If you look closer, it also comes down to good prompt and the context engineering how you shape your system.

Prompts for a large language model, how you two memory and how you optimize latency.

But voice, image video are all in play.

At BytePlus we help companies big and small, but fast at this journey, from rapid experiments to long term architectures, from character memory design to multimodal experiences with image, video, voice with wired, the models, API system prompt guidance and the best practices to make this ideal real

To sum it up, AI characters are not about replacing human connection.

They are about designing a new form of connection connections that can be the remembered, extended, and monetized.

And as the industry matures, the real question is if people will adopt AI characters.

It's how do you up yours?

What kind of prompts you will design?

Which modality you will combine and how you will make it meaningful for your users.

Thank you for watching.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of Global AI Character Trends.

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