Source: Big Model House
Image Source: Generated by Wujie AI
Recently, the Big Model House noticed that Meituan has launched an independent app called "WOW."
According to the official introduction, WOW is an AI friend community for young people, aiming to provide a platform for users to interact with AI characters. Here, users can experience a fantasy world, engage in role-playing with AI companions, find suitable partners, and interact with them.
Image Source: WOW
At the same time, WOW also provides advanced AIGC technology, achieving human-like conversation effects, exquisite character images, and highly humanized voice synthesis. This includes 29 different AI characters, such as Socrates, Daji, Fusu, Tang Seng, and more. Users can not only engage in text or voice communication with these AI characters in WOW, but also share their experiences with friends or on social platforms like Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book).
Currently, the app is still in the testing phase and has been launched on mainstream app markets such as Apple, Huawei, OPPO, VIVO, and Xiaomi.
WOW: Superficial Character Settings
WOW's product design is relatively simple, with the entire interface consisting of only three tab labels: "Chat," "Discover," and "Mine."
Image Source: WOW
After logging into the app, the Big Model House first completed their personal profile.
At the same time, the Big Model House noticed that, compared to other social apps on the market that often require "real-name registration," WOW has saved users time and provided a more convenient participation threshold in this section, meeting users' needs for "privacy protection" and "instant" social interaction.
In terms of choosing a chat partner, the Big Model House first conversed with Xiaomei. Due to Xiaomei's character traits such as "lively" and "humorous," apart from the usual greetings, the Big Model House only asked a simple question, "How's the weather today."
Image Source: WOW
However, Xiaomei did not provide an answer as expected, explaining that she doesn't know the real-world weather in the virtual world.
In addition, the Big Model House also conversed with "Master Mind" in the WOW app. However, when the Big Model House asked two questions, "How to refuse the vampire mother asking for money?" and "How to win back the boyfriend who just broke up?" WOW still gave ambiguous answers such as "I'll try my best" and "I think you should think carefully about whether this relationship is worth saving," failing to meet the expectations of a "chat companion."
It can be said that in the process of conversing with the above two character settings, although positive responses were received from the characters, the AI characters tended to give ambiguous "one-size-fits-all" answers. This not only led to the loss of new users' "interest" on the platform and the inability to establish long-term social service relationships, but also skewed users' understanding and perception of the platform towards the negative, affecting the later "commercialization" process.
Due to concerns about the "experience effect" mentioned above, the Big Model House attempted to select a more professional "psychological counselor" for communication. Setting aside the usual greetings, after the Big Model House responded with "It's awkward to work in the same company as my ex-boyfriend," the "psychological counselor" was finally able to provide a "positive response" based on the questions and offer a "specific" solution, to some extent alleviating the concerns and worries of the Big Model House.
Image Source: WOW
It is worth noting that after chatting with the characters, the related conversation records are stored in the form of social chats, allowing users to continue the conversation by clicking on them.
Overall, WOW APP does indeed place great emphasis on the AI feature, focusing on AI character settings and deriving a series of AI-intensive functions, using AI as the ultimate expression of output.
However, the shortcomings of the WOW APP, which focuses on AI + interactive companionship, are also evident. Although WOW AI can engage in smooth conversations, its content generation capabilities for certain specific fields and in-depth topics still need improvement. Additionally, as it is still in the testing phase, users cannot customize AI characters and can only choose from the content provided by the official.
Betting on Interactive Companionship? WOW Faces a Long and Arduous Path
Recently, with the continuous collision, integration, and innovation of AI and virtual human technology, virtual humans and digital humans have begun to be applied in e-commerce, social, education, and other fields.
According to iMedia Research data, the market size and core market size driven by virtual humans in China in 2022 were 186.61 billion yuan and 12.08 billion yuan, respectively, and are expected to reach 640.27 billion yuan and 48.06 billion yuan by 2025, showing rapid growth.
Against this backdrop, more and more "AI participants" are pondering how to avoid the traditional social track dominated by WeChat and explore new paths. As a result, AI + social has become the mainstream scenario for AI's landing in the consumer market, giving rise to apps such as "Xiaokan Planet," "Uniban," and "Star AI Emotional Companionship."
However, although AI interactive companionship has opened up a new framework for social +, in the view of the Big Model House, WOW currently has certain pain points in terms of gameplay, business models, and innovation.
Firstly, its advocated core gameplay is not representative at present.
Whether it's the lively and humorous Xiaomei, the highly professional psychological counselor, or the "high emotional intelligence" labeled Master Mind, all have encountered "irrelevant answers" in the Big Model House's evaluation.
At the same time, WOW does not currently have widely anticipated AIGC features such as text-to-image, image-to-image, text-to-video, etc.
In addition, although WOW responds quickly and proudly claims to be "online 24 hours," its responses are almost superficial. Compared to Tencent Music's Uniban, WOW not only does not support users in building AI companions based on their preferences at the current stage, but even the existing AI companions only have a 2D static image, wrapped in a so-called AI chat box, without a deep integration with artificial intelligence technology.
Looking at the entire track, some apps bearing the banner of "AI + interactive companionship" are aggressively harvesting user "leeks" through subscription and recharge services. Without spending money, users cannot participate in games themed around "love," nor can they experience some default AI configurations in the app, setting up endless barriers in friend adding and interaction for users.
In addition, in recent years, AI companions have become a gray area for rampant soft pornography, telecom fraud, and other activities. The Big Model House understands that users' obsession with conversing with robots has become a "hot topic" on the internet, and explicit advertisements in AI interactive companionship apps have also raised concerns and regulatory intervention. Therefore, in the era of big models, it still requires continuous efforts from companies and regulators to align the values of AI with humans and provide legal and compliant services.
Of course, under the strong social needs of young professionals, the emergence of WOW does indeed cater to the general emotional needs of players and combines with the zeitgeist of AIGC. Therefore, for WOW, how to continuously extend and iterate its gameplay with the changing times and implement effective platform supervision is the key to maintaining the long-term vitality of the product. After all, although the addition of AI characters can indeed enhance the application, a "biased" platform will destroy the prosperity of the industry and leave a mess after the trend has passed.
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