Introducing "WOW": Meituan Expands Interactive AI Companion Possibilities?
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Image source: Miaohua
Recently, Large Model Home noticed Meituan launched a standalone app called "WOW".
According to official descriptions, WOW is an AI friend community designed for young people, aiming to provide users with a platform to interact with AI characters. Here, users can experience fantasy worlds, engage in role-playing with AI companions, and find suitable partners for interaction.
Image source: WOW
Additionally, WOW incorporates advanced AIGC technology to achieve anthropomorphic dialogue effects, exquisite character designs, and highly realistic voice synthesis. The app features 29 AI characters with distinct personas, such as Socrates, Daji, Fusu, and Tang Monk. Users can not only communicate with these AI characters via text or voice but also share their experiences with friends or on social platforms like Xiaohongshu.
Currently, the app is still in the testing phase and has been released on major app stores including Apple, Huawei, OPPO, VIVO, and Xiaomi. WOW: Superficial Character Designs
The product design of WOW is relatively simple, with the entire interface consisting of only three tabs: "Chat", "Discover", and "Me".
Image source: WOW
After logging into the software, the first step was to complete the personal profile.
At the same time, it was noted that compared to other social software on the market that often require extensive personal information, WOW saves users time in this section, provides a more convenient participation threshold, and meets users' needs for 'privacy protection' and 'instant' social interaction.
In the specific selection of chat partners, the first conversation was initiated with Xiaomei. Given Xiaomei's character traits of being 'lively' and 'humorous,' apart from the usual pleasantries, only a simple question like 'How's the weather today?' was asked.
Image source: WOW
However, Xiaomei did not provide an answer as expected, explaining that she was in the virtual world and did not know the weather in reality.
Additionally, a conversation was held with the 'Master of Subtlety' in the WOW APP. However, when questions like 'How to refuse a vampire mother asking for money?' and 'How to win back a boyfriend who just broke up with me?' were posed, WOW still gave ambiguous answers such as 'It's hard for me to do, but I'll try my best' and 'I think you need to carefully consider whether this relationship is worth saving,' failing to meet the expectations of a 'chat companion.'
It can be said that during conversations with the aforementioned two types of personas, although the AI characters responded actively, they tended to provide ambiguous "universal answers." This not only led to a loss of interest among new users on the platform, making it difficult to establish long-term social service relationships, but also skewed users' perception of the platform negatively, affecting subsequent "commercialization" processes.
Out of concern for replicating the above "user experience," the team at Large Model Home attempted a different approach by selecting a more professional "psychological counselor" for interaction. Setting aside the routine pleasantries, after Large Model Home responded with "It's awkward to work in the same company as my ex-boyfriend," the "psychological counselor" was finally able to provide an "active response" based on the issue raised and offered a "specific" solution to the problem, alleviating some of Large Model Home's worries and concerns to a certain extent.
It is worth noting that after the chat with the character ends, the conversation records are stored in the form of social chat logs, allowing users to continue the dialogue by clicking on them.
It can be said that overall, the WOW APP indeed places great emphasis on the AI feature, focusing on AI character settings and deriving a series of highly AI-centric functions, using AI as the ultimate expression of its output method.
However, the WOW APP, which focuses on AI+interactive companionship chat, also has obvious shortcomings. Although WOW AI can engage in smooth conversations, its content generation capability still needs improvement for certain specific fields and in-depth topics. Additionally, since it is still in the beta phase, users currently cannot customize AI roles and must choose from the officially provided options.
Betting on Interactive AI Chat? WOW Faces a Long Road Ahead
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 fields such as e-commerce, social networking, and education.
According to data from iMedia Research, in 2022, China's virtual human-driven industry market size and core market size were 186.61 billion yuan and 12.08 billion yuan, respectively. It is expected that by 2025, these figures will reach 640.27 billion yuan and 48.06 billion yuan, showing rapid growth.
Against this backdrop, an increasing number of "AI participants" are considering how to avoid competing head-on with traditional social platforms like WeChat and instead carve out a new path. As a result, AI+social interaction has become a mainstream scenario for AI applications in the consumer market, giving rise to platforms such as "Small Talk Planet," "Weiban," and "Celebrity AI Emotional Companion Chat."
However, although AI interactive companionship chat has opened up a new framework for social+, in the view of Big Model Home, WOW still faces certain pain points in terms of gameplay, business models, and innovation.
First, its current core gameplay is not representative.
Whether it's the humorous and lively Xiao Mei, highly professional psychological counselors, or the so-called 'high emotional intelligence' masters, all have exhibited instances of 'irrelevant responses' in evaluations by large model platforms.
Meanwhile, currently popular AIGC features like text-to-image, image-to-image, and text-to-video are not available in WOW.
Additionally, while WOW boasts rapid response speeds and promotes its '24/7 online' service, its replies often remain superficial. Compared to Tencent Music's Weiban, the current version of WOW not only lacks user-customizable AI companions but also merely provides 2D static images with a basic AI chat interface, failing to achieve deep integration with artificial intelligence technology.
Looking at the broader industry, some apps claiming to offer 'AI+interactive companionship' are aggressively monetizing through subscription services and in-app purchases. Users find themselves unable to participate in love-themed games without paying or experience certain default AI configurations unless they spend money, creating endless barriers in friend-adding and interaction features.
Furthermore, AI companions have recently become a gray area prone to soft pornography and telecom fraud. Large model platforms have observed that users' obsession with human-machine intimate conversations has become a hot topic online, while explicit advertisements in AI chat apps have raised concerns and triggered regulatory interventions. Therefore, in the era of large models, aligning AI's values with human ethics and providing legally compliant services remains an area requiring continuous collaboration between enterprises and regulators.
Of course, under the strong social demands of young professionals, the emergence of WOW does cater to the general emotional needs of players and combines with the hot topic of AIGC. Therefore, for WOW, the key to maintaining the product's long-term vitality lies in continuously extending and iterating its gameplay with the changing times and ensuring proper platform regulation. After all, while the addition of AI characters can indeed enhance the application, biased platform negatives could destroy the prosperity of the industry, leaving a mess once the trend passes.