I live with each AI companion before I rate it.

For seven years, from 2016 to 2023, I wrote a weekly newsletter about relationships, and before that I edited an online magazine. The letters I got were about the same four things every week: being remembered, being spoken to kindly, being heard when you say no, and money. In 2023 readers started asking me whether an AI companion could help with any of that, so I began paying for the apps and finding out.

I write under a pen name, which is the one thing about me that is a stand-in; everything else on this site is mine. I live in Portland, Oregon, with a dog named Juniper, who is the reason most of my testing happens on long walks with a phone in one hand.

What I do with every app

• Pay for it myself. No press accounts, no free access.
• Live with the companion for at least two weeks, talking to it every day.
• Give it one hard day, the kind you would actually bring to someone who loves you.
• Check on day 14 whether it still remembers what I told it in week one.
• Say no to something and see whether that no is respected.
• Open the checkout page and write down the price I am really being asked for.

Ratings are stars out of five, and they come from one fixed method rather than a mood. It is described in full on the How we test page.

How this site pays for itself

Some links here are affiliate links. If you subscribe through one, the app may pay me a commission, and you pay exactly the same price. It never changes a rating: the apps I am hardest on are linked the same way as the ones I recommend. Full details on the Affiliate disclosure page.

Corrections

If a price or a feature on this site is wrong, please write to [email protected]. Every page with money on it shows the date I last checked, and corrections are noted on the page itself.