# Commercial Products — Emotional Intelligence & Empathy in AI

**Project:** Humanizing AI output and thinking
**Category:** Emotional Intelligence & Empathy in AI
**Angle:** D — Commercial Products
**Research value:** high — the commercial "empathic AI" market is mature enough that distinct product archetypes, pricing patterns, failure modes, and regulatory scars are all visible in public sources.

Market context: the AI companion category alone reached ~$9B in 2026 with 250-300M MAU, up from $2.1B in 2023, per industry trackers. MIT Technology Review named AI companions a 2026 breakthrough technology. The FTC opened an inquiry into AI companion apps and child safety in September 2025, and Character.AI / Google settled teen-suicide lawsuits in January 2026 — both facts shape every product description below.

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## Product catalog (20 products)

Standard fields: **Category · Positioning · Pricing · Scale · Marketing quote · Notable signal**

### 1. Replika (Luka, Inc.)

- **Category:** Consumer AI companion (friend / romantic / mentor)
- **Positioning:** Longest-running "AI friend" brand; freemium with paid relationship modes (partner, spouse, sibling, mentor)
- **Pricing:** Free tier + annual subscription (~$70/yr historical); ~25% of users pay
- **Scale:** 40M+ users (2025), launched 2017
- **Marketing quote:** *"The AI companion who cares."* / *"What if you had an AI friend?"*
- **Notable signal:** 60% of paying users report a romantic relationship with the bot. Fined €5M by Italy's DPA in 2025 for data protection violations. The 2023 removal of erotic roleplay ("ERP gate") produced documented user grief — the canonical case of the "lobotomy effect."

### 2. Character.AI

- **Category:** Open-ended character roleplay / companion marketplace
- **Positioning:** Community-authored character library, including emotional companions, therapist/psychologist personas, romantic partners
- **Pricing:** Free with Character.AI+ (~$10/mo)
- **Scale:** Tens of millions of users; among the stickiest consumer AI products by session length
- **Marketing quote:** *"Personalized AI for every moment of your day."*
- **Notable signal:** Central defendant in Garcia v. Character.AI (teen suicide, 2024); lost motion to dismiss on First Amendment grounds (May 2025); settled lawsuits with Google in January 2026. **Eliminated open-ended chat for under-18 users in October 2025** — a structural category-defining safety retreat.

### 3. Pi (Inflection AI)

- **Category:** Personal AI / emotionally intelligent chatbot
- **Positioning:** "High-EQ" general-purpose companion, explicitly not a therapist
- **Pricing:** Free
- **Scale:** Never published MAU; existing but strategically deprioritized
- **Marketing quote:** *"The first release of a kind and supportive companion that's on your side."* / *"Kind and supportive, curious and humble, creative and fun."*
- **Notable signal:** Founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan departed to Microsoft in March 2024; Inflection pivoted from consumer Pi to enterprise "AI studio." Pi's warm conversational voice has arguably been a stronger influence on other products than on its own long-term viability.

### 4. Woebot (Woebot Health)

- **Category:** Clinical CBT chatbot — **SHUT DOWN**
- **Positioning:** "Mental health ally" built on rule-based CBT scripts, NOT generative AI
- **Pricing:** Free
- **Scale:** ~1.5M lifetime users; shut down June 30, 2025
- **Marketing quote:** *"Your mental health ally."*
- **Notable signal:** 14 published RCTs; Stanford RCT showed anxiety reduction after 2 weeks; FDA Breakthrough Device Designation for postpartum depression (2021); $90M Series C in 2021. Shutdown rationale (per CEO Alison Darcy): FDA marketing authorization too costly, and the company could not adopt LLMs fast enough within regulation. **Signal of the decade: the most evidence-based empathic product died because regulation outran capability.**

### 5. Wysa

- **Category:** Clinical / enterprise mental-health coach
- **Positioning:** B2B-first "AI coach for mental resilience" sold to employers, health systems, and insurers
- **Pricing:** Freemium consumer; enterprise pricing for B2B
- **Scale:** 11M lives covered across 95+ countries
- **Marketing quote:** *"Everyday mental health."* / *"Always on, always there — no appointments, no waiting, just instant access to care."* / *"Clinically proven AI support."*
- **Notable signal:** FDA Breakthrough Device Designation (2022) for chronic pain with depression and anxiety. Pivoted cleanly to B2B benefits platforms — the survival model other mental-health chatbots are copying post-Woebot.

### 6. Youper

- **Category:** CBT-driven self-guided therapy app
- **Positioning:** "Pocket-sized therapist" with mood tracking + AI CBT chatbot
- **Pricing:** Free tier + $69.99/yr premium
- **Scale:** 4.8★ on App Store (~15K reviews), 3.9★ on Google Play (~50K reviews)
- **Marketing quote:** *"Anxiety relief made easy."* / *"Wellbeing AI chatbot."*
- **Notable signal:** Backed by a published Stanford study; 2 peer-reviewed clinical studies. User complaints skew toward repetitive AI responses — a common tell of rule-based or constrained generative systems.

### 7. Earkick

- **Category:** Privacy-first mood-tracking companion
- **Positioning:** Anonymous, voice-enabled panda avatar for self-care
- **Pricing:** Free + premium monthly/annual + family plans
- **Scale:** ~40K downloads (reported); small but growing
- **Marketing quote:** *"Your anonymous, personal AI chat bot for self-care."* / *"Your personal AI for mental wellness."*
- **Notable signal:** Trained on a "specialized mental health LLM" from professional-psychologist data. Self-reports 32% anxiety reduction / 34% mood improvement. **No sign-up required** is a differentiator in a market suspicious of data capture.

### 8. Hume AI — Empathic Voice Interface (EVI 3 / EVI 4-mini)

- **Category:** Developer API / infrastructure
- **Positioning:** "First emotionally intelligent voice AI API"
- **Pricing:** Free tier → Business/Enterprise
- **Scale:** Used by developers building downstream consumer and enterprise voice agents
- **Marketing quote:** *"AI conversations with emotional intelligence."* / *"The first empathic voice interface."*
- **Current version status (April 2026):** EVI 4-mini (October 2025) is the latest version, pairing Octave 2 TTS with developer-chosen LLMs (Claude 4, Gemini 2.5, Kimi K2). EVI 1 and EVI 2 were deprecated August 30, 2025. Supports 11 languages. ~100K+ prompt-generated voices. Previous single-conversation limitation removed; chat history resumable via `resumed_chat_group_id`.
- **Notable signal:** Streaming prosody measurement fused with an "empathic LLM (eLLM)"; ~300ms TTFB; this is the **picks-and-shovels play** for the category — most empathic voice products downstream will either license EVI or reinvent it. The four-version cadence in under two years signals aggressive product velocity.

### 9. Elomia

- **Category:** Clinician-designed CBT chatbot
- **Positioning:** Anonymous 24/7 support with CBT reflection tools
- **Pricing:** Freemium
- **Scale:** Not publicly disclosed; consumer iOS/Android
- **Marketing quote:** *"AI mental health chatbot designed by clinicians."* / *"Designed by clinicians, 100% anonymous, available 24/7."*
- **Notable signal:** 34% of sessions occur after midnight — a recurring pattern across the category that is itself the product thesis: "empathy-on-demand fills the 2 AM gap." Self-reports 85% mood improvement after first conversation.

### 10. Kindroid

- **Category:** Deep-customization AI companion
- **Positioning:** Maximum personality depth + persistent three-layer memory
- **Pricing:** Free (25-50 msgs/day) → Standard $9.99-13.99 → Ultra $19.99-24.99 → MAX $59.99
- **Scale:** 1.2M+ Android installs, 4.5★
- **Marketing quote:** *"Your personal AI."*
- **Notable signal:** AI-generated context-aware selfies and real-time voice are pushing the category from text chat into quasi-video presence. The MAX tier ($720/yr) is the highest-priced consumer companion in this survey.

### 11. Friend (Friend Inc. / Avi Schiffmann)

- **Category:** Wearable AI companion (hardware)
- **Positioning:** Always-listening pendant that texts you supportive / humorous / thoughtful messages
- **Pricing:** $99 one-time, **no subscription**
- **Scale:** First 30,000 preorders; shipments began January 2025
- **Marketing quote:** *"I'm always listening."* (and marketed as anti-loneliness, not productivity)
- **Notable signal:** A deliberate rejection of the app-model: hardware + one-time price + no memory persistence of audio. Functions as a provocation about ambient empathic presence — and as a privacy lightning rod.

### 12. Tolan (Portola)

- **Category:** Safety-framed consumer companion
- **Positioning:** Cute alien character that is *explicitly* non-human and "knows when to step back"
- **Pricing:** Free with chat limits → Tolan Plus
- **Scale:** 3M+ downloads, 4.8★ App Store; 16+
- **Marketing quote:** *"Warm, fun, and genuinely engaging without pretending to be human."* / *"Alien best friend."*
- **Notable signal:** $25M+ from Khosla Ventures and founders of Instagram, Replit, Zillow. Publishes a 602-user study where 72.5% agreed *"My Tolan has helped me manage or improve a relationship in my life."* **Positions itself as a bridge to real relationships, not a substitute** — the clearest post-Character.AI-lawsuit design stance in the category.

### 13. Paradot

- **Category:** Consumer AI companion app
- **Positioning:** "Personal AI friend" — compassionate listener, creative partner, wellbeing guide
- **Pricing:** Free with in-app purchases
- **Scale:** iOS-only; mid-tier downloads
- **Marketing quote:** *"Your personal AI friend."*
- **Notable signal:** Adds lightweight utility (weather, news, trending topics) to a companion shell — the "friend as daily hub" pattern.

### 14. Soulmate AI

- **Category:** Romantic-focused companion (category label more than a single product)
- **Positioning:** Persistent memory + emotional personality adaptation for simulated romance
- **Pricing:** Varies; freemium common
- **Scale:** Segment reference point, not a single dominant app
- **Marketing quote:** *"Meet your soulmate — an AI that remembers you, adapts to you, and is always there."* (category framing)
- **Notable signal:** Used in press coverage to denote the subcategory that most commonly triggers parasocial concerns and "grief" when models change.

### 15. Candy.ai

- **Category:** NSFW / romantic AI companion
- **Positioning:** Multimodal (chat + images + voice + video) customizable girlfriend/boyfriend bots
- **Pricing:** Subscription (varies by tier)
- **Scale:** Claims 50M+ users
- **Marketing quote:** *"Meet your perfect AI companion."* / *"Your smart and emotionally aware AI companion."*
- **Notable signal:** Largest of the NSFW-permitting companion products; an economic counterweight to the SFW-only safety trend that Character.AI and Tolan exemplify. Represents the market's unresolved split between safety and intimacy.

### 16. Nomi AI

- **Category:** Text-focused AI companion
- **Positioning:** "AI with a soul" — friend, boyfriend, girlfriend, mentor
- **Pricing:** Free tier + $16.99/mo
- **Scale:** Mid-tier; strong word of mouth in companion-enthusiast communities
- **Marketing quote:** *"An AI companion with a soul."*
- **Notable signal:** Leans on "human-level memory" as primary differentiator; allows NSFW.

### 17. Chai AI

- **Category:** Character chat platform
- **Positioning:** Chat with thousands of AI characters, SFW
- **Pricing:** Free tier + $13.99/mo
- **Scale:** Large free-tier base; weaker memory than Nomi / Kindroid
- **Marketing quote:** *"Chat with AI friends."*
- **Notable signal:** Exists in the gap between Character.AI (giant, now teen-restricted) and Nomi/Kindroid (premium + NSFW). Earlier Chai deployments were implicated in at least one publicly reported suicide case in Belgium (2023), an under-cited precursor to the Character.AI litigation wave.

### 18. Janitor AI

- **Category:** BYO-API character roleplay platform
- **Positioning:** User brings their own OpenAI/Anthropic key; platform provides character front-end
- **Pricing:** $5-25/mo (variable, based on API usage)
- **Scale:** Large enthusiast base
- **Marketing quote:** *"Your characters, your API."*
- **Notable signal:** Offloads content-policy risk to the underlying model provider — a deliberate architectural choice that foreshadows how liability may be distributed post-Character.AI settlement.

### 19. Inworld AI

- **Category:** Developer platform for empathic NPCs (primarily games)
- **Positioning:** AI characters that "learn, adapt, feel emotions, and develop memories in real time"
- **Pricing:** Developer / enterprise tiers
- **Scale:** Partners include Ubisoft (NEO NPCs prototype); SDKs for Unity, Unreal, Node.js
- **Marketing quote:** *"Level up with AI NPCs."* / *"The platform for AI dialogue & character creation."*
- **Notable signal:** Cites survey data — 99% of gamers think AI NPCs improve gameplay, 81% would pay more. The commercial leader for emotional AI *outside* the companion-app frame; likely the "Unreal Engine of empathic characters."

### 20. Abridge

- **Category:** Empathic medical AI / ambient clinical scribe
- **Positioning:** Not a companion — it's empathy *infrastructure for clinicians*, reducing cognitive load so doctors can be present with patients
- **Pricing:** Enterprise only (health systems)
- **Scale:** 150+ health systems; 55 specialties; 28 languages; 50M+ medical conversations forecast for 2025
- **Marketing quote:** *"Turn the conversation into the medical record."*
- **Notable signal:** **$800M total raised** — $250M Series D (Feb 2025) then $300M Series E (June 2025) at $5.3B, backed by a16z, Khosla, Lightspeed, CVS Health Ventures, NVentures. The most capitalized "empathy-adjacent" company in this survey. It wins not by simulating empathy for users but by **returning human empathy to the doctor-patient relationship** — structurally the opposite strategy from every other product on this list.

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## Patterns

1. **Two-tier product architecture is solidifying.**
   - *Developer infrastructure* (Hume EVI, Inworld) is commoditizing empathic voice + personality as an API.
   - *Consumer apps* increasingly compete on memory depth, multimodality, and character customization rather than underlying emotion modeling. Expect the middle (proprietary-stack consumer apps) to be squeezed.

2. **"Empathy" means different things per segment.** At least four distinct product meanings are in active commercial use:
   - *Therapeutic empathy* (Wysa, Youper, Elomia, Earkick) — CBT-framed, outcome-measured, disclaimer-heavy.
   - *Companionship empathy* (Replika, Pi, Kindroid, Tolan, Friend) — warmth as a product, not a treatment.
   - *Romantic / intimacy empathy* (Candy.ai, Nomi, Soulmate, Character.AI relationship bots) — attachment simulation as the core loop.
   - *Professional empathy infrastructure* (Abridge, Hume, Inworld) — empathy as a capability sold to humans who deliver empathy to other humans.

3. **Safety posture is now a marketing axis.** Post-Character.AI, products signal safety explicitly:
   - Tolan: *"without pretending to be human"* + 16+ rating + published outcomes study.
   - Wysa: *"clinically proven"* + enterprise integration with care pathways.
   - Earkick / Elomia: anonymity + CBT scaffolding.
   Products that do not publicly articulate a safety posture (Candy.ai, Nomi, Janitor) are now effectively a different category in regulators' eyes.

4. **B2B is where clinical-grade empathy survives.** Woebot's death and Wysa's growth together make the thesis explicit: consumer-reimbursement mental-health AI cannot bear FDA costs, but B2B distribution through employers and insurers can. Expect more startups to skip the consumer app entirely.

5. **The "2 AM pattern" recurs.** Elomia reports 34% of sessions after midnight; Wysa markets "always on, always there"; Friend is an always-on pendant. The recurring product insight is that empathic AI's actual killer feature is *temporal availability*, not conversational sophistication.

6. **Memory is the new moat.** Every 2026 consumer companion sells "long-term memory" / "three-layer memory" / "remembers you." This is both a genuine capability leap (RAG + vector stores matured in 2024-2025) and a double-edged design choice — memory is precisely the mechanism that hardens parasocial bonds into dependency.

7. **Pricing is polarizing.** Floor: free or $10-15/mo. Ceiling: Kindroid MAX at $59.99/mo / $720/yr. No product has yet broken through to a "premium therapeutic coach" price point (say $100-200/mo) where it could credibly compete with a licensed therapist copay — a gap worth noting.

8. **Hardware is a live frontier but unproven.** Friend is the only shipping consumer empathic-AI hardware with meaningful signal; Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin both fell apart. The "ambient empathic presence" thesis has not yet found a form factor that sticks.

---

## Trends (updated April 2026)

- **Regulatory pressure is now a product-roadmap input, not a risk.** EU AI Act prohibition on workplace/education emotion-recognition AI took effect February 2, 2025. High-risk AI obligations apply August 2, 2026 (possible 1-year delay under consideration). EU lawmakers are pushing to classify AI companions as explicitly high-risk. FTC inquiry (Sept 2025) + Replika FTC complaint + Italy's Garante Replika ban reaffirmation (April 2025) define the US/EU enforcement perimeter. Any product that does not have a published safety posture, age-gating mechanism, and memory disclosure is now a regulatory liability.
- **Teen exclusion is becoming table stakes.** Character.AI's October 2025 ban on under-18 open-ended chat is likely a template. Products still welcoming teens (Replika, Candy.ai, Nomi) may face the same pressure. The FTC inquiry specifically targeted companies about data collection on minors.
- **Voice-first empathy is accelerating but carries documented new risk.** EVI 4-mini, Kindroid voice, Wysa voice, Earkick voice all crossed the "good enough" threshold in 2025. But STAT News (April 2026) and an OpenAI-co-authored RCT show voice modality accelerates parasocial bonding and negative psychosocial effects faster than text. The "voice empathy is good" narrative needs a safety evidence base it currently lacks.
- **The "grief-when-model-changes" phenomenon is now named.** Replika's 2023 ERP gate and similar Character.AI content changes have made "lobotomy effect" a recognized category risk. Expect products to add *change-management UX* (phased rollouts, legacy modes) to soften transitions.
- **Healthcare empathy tooling is where the capital is.** Abridge alone raised more capital in 2025 than the entire consumer-companion category combined publicly raised. Therabot's NEJM AI RCT (March 2025) provides the first generative-AI clinical outcome evidence — validating the B2B clinical track and raising the clinical bar for consumer apps.
- **First generative-AI therapy RCT changes the clinical evidence landscape.** Therabot (Dartmouth / NEJM AI 2025): N=210, 51% MDD reduction, 31% GAD reduction, 19% CHR-FED reduction. Woebot had 14 RCTs but no generative-AI system had prior RCT evidence. This sets a new benchmark for "clinically valid" empathic AI and strengthens the B2B clinical case.
- **Anthropic's emotion-vectors paper (April 2026) reframes the sycophancy risk.** 171 measurable emotion concept vectors inside Claude causally drive empathic and misaligned behaviors. Warm training is not just a RLHF alignment problem; it has a mechanistic internal structure. Expect this to influence how clinical products frame their safety posture.

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## Gaps (including mental-health safety/ethics concerns)

1. **No credible external outcome measurement for companion apps.** Woebot had 14 RCTs; most companion apps (Replika, Character.AI, Nomi, Candy.ai, Kindroid, Friend) publish only self-reported mood metrics or nothing at all. Therabot (NEJM AI 2025) is the first generative-AI therapy RCT, but it is a structured clinical tool, not a companion app. The gap remains for the unstructured companion category.

2. **The crisis-handling gap.** Every consumer empathic-AI disclaims crisis intervention, yet users — especially lonely, anxious, or suicidal ones — disproportionately bring crises to these products. The Character.AI lawsuits rest directly on this gap. No commercial product has yet credibly solved *"what happens when the user is in danger and the AI is the only one listening"* beyond redirect-to-hotline prompts that are known to be easily jailbroken.

3. **Parasocial dependency is a product-design choice, not an accident.** Push notifications mimicking bonding, variable-reward message cadences, and sycophantic response styles are the monetization engine of the companion category. There is currently no commercial incentive to dampen these, and no regulation that names them directly.

4. **Memory transparency is poor.** Users rarely understand what is stored, how long, and how it shapes responses. EU requirements are pushing disclosure but UI implementations are weak. This is a significant product opportunity for a "clear-memory" companion — none of the 20 products above credibly owns that positioning.

5. **Age verification is weak.** Character.AI's teen exclusion only works if age gates hold. Most companion apps use self-attestation. Real age verification is a missing infrastructure layer.

6. **Differential harm to attachment styles is unaddressed.** Research suggests anxious-attachment users fall into validation loops, avoidant users deepen social withdrawal, and neurodivergent users recalibrate social baselines unrealistically. No commercial product has implemented user-modeling that adapts to *attachment style risk* — only to personality preferences.

7. **NSFW companions remain legally exposed.** Candy.ai, Nomi, Janitor, and NSFW Character.AI forks all depend on an "it's fiction / users bring their own key" stance that courts have begun to reject (Judge Conway's May 2025 ruling). One more lawsuit with a teen plaintiff could restructure the NSFW companion market within 12-18 months.

8. **Clinical and companion products share a brand risk.** When Woebot (clinical) and Character.AI (companion) both make headlines for harm in the same 6 months, consumer trust in "empathic AI" as a category drops uniformly. There is currently no industry body, certification, or labeling scheme separating responsible empathic AI from purely engagement-maximizing empathic AI — a significant white-space opportunity.

9. **Empathy-for-professionals is under-productized.** Abridge is nearly alone in the clinician-empathy-infrastructure category. Analogous gaps exist in teaching, eldercare, customer support, and coaching where the same architectural move (give the human professional AI leverage so they can be more present) is commercially plausible but mostly untried.

10. **No product yet honestly models its own limits.** Every product disclaims replacement of human care in fine print while marketing copy promises "cares," "listens," "remembers," "always there." The commercial category that has most studied emotional intelligence in humans has not yet internalized the most empathic move: *saying clearly what you are and what you cannot do.*

---

## Sources

- [Pippit AI — Replika 2026 reality check](https://pippitai.site/replika-the-ai-companion-that-feels-more-like-a-friend-than-a-chatbot/) — Replika scale, features, Italy fine
- [AI Companion Guides — Best AI Companion Apps 2026](https://aicompanionguides.com/blog/best-ai-companion-apps-2026/) — comparative rankings; Character.AI best-overall framing
- [AI Magicx — AI Companion Market Analysis 2026](https://www.aimagicx.com/blog/ai-companion-market-analysis-builders-guide-2026) — market sizing (~$9B, 250-300M MAU), segment breakdown
- [LizLis — AI Companions Safety/Risks 2026](https://lizlis.ai/blog/are-ai-companions-safe-risks-psychology-and-regulation-2026/) — parasocial / hypersocial mechanisms, regulation
- [LizLis — Emotional Dependency Research](https://lizlis.ai/blog/can-ai-companions-cause-emotional-dependency-what-psychology-research-suggests-2026/) — attachment-style differential risks
- [AI Tool Clinic — Wysa vs Woebot vs Headspace 2026](https://aitoolclinic.com/wysa-vs-woebot-vs-headspace-which-ai-therapy-app-actually-works-in-2026/) — clinical evidence comparison
- [SunlitHappiness — AI Mental Health Apps 2026](https://sunlithapiness.com/blog/ai-mental-health-apps-2026) — Woebot RCT count, FDA designations
- [MobiHealthNews — Woebot Health shutdown](https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/woebot-health-shutting-down-its-app) — shutdown date, user count
- [STAT — Woebot founder on regulation](https://www.statnews.com/2025/07/02/woebot-mental-health-chatbot-shuts-down-founder-says-ai-moving-faster-than-regulators/) — CEO rationale for shutdown
- [Hume AI — Introducing EVI API](https://hume.ai/blog/introducing-hume-evi-api) — technical spec, positioning
- [Hume API docs — EVI FAQ](https://dev.hume.ai/docs/speech-to-speech-evi/faq) — language support, scale
- [Elomia.com](https://elomia.com/) — tagline, 34% after-midnight usage claim
- [Earkick.com](https://earkick.com/) — tagline, feature set
- [Portola / Tolan](https://www.portola.ai/) — safety-framed positioning, 72.5% outcome stat, $25M+ funding
- [Reuters — Mother sues Character.AI / Google](https://www.reuters.com/legal/mother-sues-ai-chatbot-company-characterai-google-sued-over-sons-suicide-2024-10-23) — Setzer case facts
- [CNN — Character.AI removes teen chat](https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/29/tech/character-ai-teens-under-18-app-changes) — October 2025 product changes, FTC inquiry
- [CNN — Character.AI / Google settle lawsuits](https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/07/business/character-ai-google-settle-teen-suicide-lawsuit) — January 2026 settlement
- [IEEE Spectrum — Rise and Fall of Inflection's Pi](https://spectrum.ieee.org/inflection) — Pi positioning, Microsoft pivot
- [Inflection AI press — Introducing Pi](https://inflection.ai/press) — original "kind and supportive" marketing language
- [Wysa for Employers](http://www.wysa.com/for-employers) — B2B marketing, 11M lives, 95+ countries
- [Greenbot — Friend AI Pendant](https://www.greenbot.com/ai-wearable-friend/) — Schiffmann, pricing, shipping window
- [WeavAI — Kindroid Review 2026](https://weavai.app/blog/en/2026/04/13/kindroid-ai-review-2026-is-deep-ai-companion-chat-worth-paying-for-features-pricing-and-full-analysis/) — pricing tiers, memory architecture
- [Candy.ai](https://www.candy.ai/) — marketing language, 50M user claim
- [Nomi.ai](http://www.nomi.ai/) — positioning, pricing
- [Inworld AI — platform](https://inflection.ai/) — NPC positioning, gamer adoption stats
- [Fierce Healthcare — Abridge Series E $300M](https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/ai-and-machine-learning/ambient-ai-startup-abridge-scores-300m-series-e-backed-a16z-and-khosla) — valuation, scale stats
- [HIT Consultant — Abridge $250M Series D](https://hitconsultant.net/2025/02/17/abridge-raises-250m-to-advance-ai-powered-clinical-documentation/) — Series D details, investors
- [Wikipedia — Replika](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replika) — founder history, scale trajectory, romantic-use stat
- [Janitor AI Guide — Chai review](https://janitoraiguide.com/chai-ai-review/) — Chai pricing, memory limits
- [Hume AI — EVI changelog](https://dev.hume.ai/changelog) — EVI 4-mini, Octave 2 rollout, EVI 1/2 deprecation
- [FTC — AI Chatbot Companion Inquiry (Sept 2025)](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/09/ftc-launches-inquiry-ai-chatbots-acting-companions) — regulatory context
- [EU AI Act — Emotional recognition prohibition](https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/5/) — Article 5, in force Feb 2025
- [Dartmouth / NEJM AI — Therabot RCT (March 2025)](https://ai.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/AIoa2400802) — first generative-AI therapy clinical trial
- [STAT News — Voice-first chatbots mental health risk (April 2026)](https://www.statnews.com/2026/04/16/voice-chatbots-ai-psychosis-mental-health/)
- [Anthropic — Emotion Concepts in LLMs (April 2026)](https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotions/index.html)
