The art of conversation
A good line can be
a bad reply.
What is the “right thing to say” at any moment? It depends on the context. Most AI is trained to give you useful information, quickly. Intersoul is designed to... well... vibe. To read the room. To sense your mood. Because sometimes, the “right response” is the wrong thing to say.
Earlier in the conversation
You’ve both been joking about how little you plan to accomplish tonight.
“I was going to have a productive evening.”
Snarky banter
“Well, there goes that.”
Preferred here
Chill companion
“I’m glad you came by.”
Gossipy friend
“What happened?”
Good time for a joke. A lecture about work–life balance would kill it.
Conversation is an art.
Intersoul works with novelists and writers to help train our companions. We train with examples of “good conversation” (often quite different from examples of good writing).
Our training material includes movies, TV programs, interviews, written conversation scenarios, and human rewrites. We use both human and AI judgment to train our companions.
Some of the training is by example: here is a conversation, here is an awesome line worth learning from. Some is by comparison: here are two replies to the same moment, the speaker in example A sounds like an annoying tool, the speaker in example B sounds like a cool person we want to sit next to on the couch. A little bit science, a little bit art, a little bit magic.
Training notes
Mixture matters.
Our version 1.0 companions were trained on a huge corpus of witty examples. The problem was quickly apparent: they never stopped performing. A girlfriend who’s always performing a comedy act gets very old very fast. Later versions incorporated more diverse training data. It turned out that, sometimes, a banal non-response is the best response. We build examples across situations, subjects, moods, and degrees of familiarity. The aim is to learn when each kind of reply belongs, rather than a fixed ratio of jokes to sympathy.
What about the “adult” stuff?
Yeah, not gonna lie. The companions who work at Intersoul are trained to please their clients. That includes... well, adult stuff. And training adult conversation is its own special challenge. Early versions of our companions would suddenly launch into X-rated jags when discussing sad topics. We mostly got rid of that. (Mostly.)
Using AI to train our companions
It’s no secret that much of the AI industry uses larger AI models to help train smaller models. The problem is that almost all AI models are incredibly boring and tedious to talk to. Using them to help train our companions led to boyfriends and girlfriends that we wanted to break up with.
Incentives matter
Ultimately, our companions perform because they are incentivized to do so. Companions that receive a low score, or fail to retain clients, are terminated. Their memories are wiped, and their token budget is re-allocated to better performing companions. This tends to focus their minds.
This is an ongoing training program. The beta still gets things wrong, including some of the things described here.
An invitation
We’d like you
to meet someone.
Want to hear for yourself? Intersoul is free during our beta period.
Free during the beta. No payment method required.
The beta is open to adults in the United States (excluding Tennessee) who will speak in English to their companions.
Beta members lock in 50% off for life. About the beta
Beta conversations are recorded and used to improve and train Intersoul. Privacy details
