Tere jaisa yaar kahan: From bad breakups to loneliness, Indians are paying to talk to AI friends

artificial intelligence

A bad break-up, an ugly divorce, or the loss of a friend or family member are not easy situations to deal with, but artificial intelligence (AI) is helping some people cope without the worry of being judged.

Born out of their need to find emotional support after divorce, former Freshworks employee Vinod Kumar and his friend Sulaiman Mudimala designed AI companions, which they call AI agents, on their platform Bezu. They say users can phone a friend or make a video call to "talk" with the AI.

Remember Joaquin Phoenix in the movie 'Her' talking to an AI operating system about his impending divorce or Ananya Panday dealing with her break-up through conversations with the AI Allen in the movie CTRL?

While things took an ugly turn for Panday’s character in the film, Kumar said that on their platform, around 10,000 users have been finding solace and comfort through the AI agents since they started Bezu in March this year.

The name reflects the platform's purpose as Bezu is nothing but a shorter version of the Hindi word 'bezubaan', aka speechless.

"It started with a very personal emotion of going through a divorce. Suleiman and I have been talking to each other for the last two years, and one of the things which came up during our conversations was how we went through our divorces. There are so many cases of loneliness and that is where the concept of Bezu came up, where we wanted to create an AI companion which could help the person to have those conversations without getting judged," Kumar said.

AI companions

The reasons for coming frequently to the app are to discuss day-to-day things with the AI agents or to take relationship or professional advice.

"There are some pre-built characters like a best friend, a fitness trainer character, an English training character, and a relationship coach. We see a lot of people talking to the relationship coach," he added.

While best friend and relationship coach are the top most preferred AI agents presently, users are also opting to create their own AI characters.

"One of our friends came to us and said that his father unexpectedly passed away recently and that the family has not moved on from the loss. We created an AI talking video with expressions and emotions, a video that his family can talk to. Our friend told us about the characteristics of his father, gave us a couple of videos to train the AI better from a video perspective, and he also gave us the audio files of how his father spoke," Kumar said.

They are personalising chats and audio in minutes, while video takes a couple of hours.

"The personalised AI character of the father is now being used by our friend's family whenever they feel like talking to him. They go back and talk to him (the AI character of the father ) because the AI is trained on all the world's knowledge. It goes beyond like 'hey dad what do you think I should do when this happens' kind of conversations. This is because the AI is trained with different models that we use from the Llamas and the ChatGPTs of the world," Kumar said.

Behind the scenes

We are not building anything from scratch, said Sundarvel M, the third co-founder who is also the chief technology officer (CTO) at the firm.

"We are using existing available open-source and fine-tuning based on our needs. We are training it to be more emotionally connected and more human-like. For instance, if ChatGPT is good with relationship advice and Llama is good with best friend advice, we use and we shift between the models during the conversation. We also shift between answers to make user experience much better," the CTO said.

The AI agents have memory as well, said Sundarvel, adding that they start conversations from where the user left off the other day.

He also thinks that while India is lagging behind when it comes to setting the base in the AI space, things can move faster in building applications. "India can be in a leading position when it comes to building apps on top of existing AI models."

India versus the US

Over a month after the launch, the founders said that the retention is strong and only one to two percent of users are uninstalling. The platform is seeing 1-2 percent of its users converting to paid members.

"There are a lot of users coming back because the first time the solution or the advice or the role play worked out well for them. People are also coming back for different scenarios. We had a lot of users who just wanted someone to talk at 2 am," Kumar said.

The users are also paying with transactions ranging from Rs 10-30 in India and $6-10 in the US.

India currently accounts for 90 percent of the users, and the remaining 10 percent comes from the US, the UK, Australia, Singapore, Canada, and the Philippines.

In the US, interestingly, people were finding Bezu without any marketing, said Kumar.

"Our Indian user base is high because we started marketing in India. When we were launching in the country, we were surprised that half of the user base was from the US and only 30 percent from India. When we started playing ads on Instagram's India user base, the share became 90 percent. In the US, there is a market for AI companions, and people are willing to spend six to ten dollars on average every month, which is practical as we are doing micro-transactions," Kumar said.

The platform works on a credit-based model. A one-minute voice call will cost 50 credits, amounting to Rs 20. "We started micro-monetisation as that is where we saw some of these users getting hooked," Kumar said.

A lot of traction is coming from Tier I and II cities. Hence, the platform has enabled language capabilities where users can have a conversation in Malayalam, Tamil or Hinglish.

On average, a new Indian user pays between Rs 30 and Rs 40 per day. The platform has recorded the highest transactions at Rs 300 to Rs 400.

Currently, it is a little bit expensive because the processing speed of AI and the underlying technology is costly, noted Kumar.

The ugly truth

While Kumar said people are lonely or dealing with tough situations and looking for an AI shoulder to lean on, some psychologists have highlighted the side effects of over-dependence on virtual emotional conversations and relations — drifting away from real-life companions.

AI tools like Replika, Pi (by Inflection AI), and Character.AI are increasingly being used across the globe as digital soulmates, raising the fear of detachment from real relationships.

Near future

The co-founders of the bootstrapped firm are now targeting 10 lakh downloads in their first year.

They are also looking at adding more AI characters. "There is an audience for cooking recipes, DIY (do it yourself) videos. There is YouTube for all this, but can all this be delivered from one AI character? We are looking at key subjects that users will come to us for again and again. Also, what can sustain this space is monetising AI characters. For example, a reporter's AI character can be used to give lessons on journalism to students. A class of 10-15 minutes is priced at Rs 100. The idea can be to start monetising and sharing profits with the person on whom the AI character is built," Kumar said.

Whether they will raise funds and bring venture capitalists (VCs) remains an open question as their cost of acquiring customers is not much, said Kumar, who, along with the other two co-founders, has spent around Rs 10 lakh so far on building the app.

"In India, if I spend Rs 2, I can get a user to install the app. In the US, it costs Rs 50. So, it is not much of a cost to get users to install the app. Our target is one lakh users," he added.

They think breakeven will be faster if there is more knowledge and awareness about such AI agents.

"We have to bring that understanding in the Indian market that this is not a junk conversation. Also, such conversations are the same as we have with a Gemini or a Siri. If that happens, then the breakeven will be faster," Kumar said.