As the popularity of ChatGPT has become a phenomenon, with more and more people trying it out and using it for a myriad of different applications, it’s taken the world by storm and has become the fastest growing app in Internet history.
Now what if you could take it up a notch? Instead of just typing with a chatbot and reading responses, imagine if you could bring your AI conversation to life.
A recently released app named “Call Annie” does exactly that. Unlike the usual chatbot conversation, Call Annie is a program that allows you to interact with a life-like avatar, like you’re talking to someone on a video call.
This app really hit the spotlight when a Twitter user shared a video of his conversation with the new visual chatbot that went viral.
Created by Midjourney, an AI text-to-image tool, Annie’s avatar looks very realistic. The expressions and lip movements are animated to mimic actual speech, so it does look like she is really talking. Although the AI voice sounds a bit robotic, it still sounds natural enough that a conversation with “Annie” is still an overall compelling experience.
Call Annie works like OpenAI’s ChatGPT in that you can ask it, or ask it to do almost anything – explain the process of photosynthesis, help me write a cover letter/fine tune my resume/practice for a job interview, brainstorm ideas, get recommendations on anything from where to shop to relationship advice. Users can expect the same responses as they would get on the ChatGPT platform, but with a bit of a twist.
The face-to-face interaction now alleviates the need to type questions and read responses, so it’s a much more natural feeling interaction. Call Annie also tends to be more conversational, not only answering questions, but engaging you and asking questions related to your input, which you would not get from the regular ChatGPT chatbot.
Right now, Call Annie can speak English, Italian and Spanish.
Program Limitations
Nothing is without it’s limitations, of course, and Annie has a few. This is to be expected with any new release of a never-before-seen program.
Annie can sometimes mispronounce words, but as it’s a learning module, it will improve over time. And like any of the chatbots, the information may not always be correct, so it’s always a good idea to double check any facts you get from Call Annie with other reliable sources.
For privacy reasons, no voice conversations are saved, but a transcription of the dialogue is forwarded to ChatGPT. The app, however, allows you to delete any conversation from your Chat history.
Developed by Animato.Ai, the app is currently only available for Apple products and requires at least an iPhone12 for mobile use or a MacOS 13 with an M-series processor for desktop/laptop use. This poses an accessibility problem for anyone not using these higher end devices. But, if you’re one of the lucky ones who has the hardware and wants to take Annie for a test drive, you can download the Call Annie app at the Apple Store.
