Introducing Parental Insights: Enhanced Safety for Teens

We are a small team here at Character.AI, but many of us are parents who know firsthand the challenge of navigating new technologies while raising teenagers. Over the past year, we have rolled out a suite of new safety features across our platform, designed specifically with teens in mind. These features include a separate model for our teen users, improvements to our detection and intervention systems for human behavior and model responses, and more. 

Today, we are adding another tool: Parental Insights. This feature is the first step in providing parents with information about the time their teen spends on Character.AI. 

How It Works

The new Parental Insights feature provides parents and guardians access to a summary of their teen’s activity on the platform. These insights help give a clearer understanding of how users under 18 engage with Character.AI, including:

• Daily average time spent on the platform across both web and mobile.
• Top Characters their teen interacted with most frequently during the week. This does not include a user’s chat content. 
• Time spent with each Character, giving parents insight into engagement patterns.

Users under 18 can add a parent or guardian’s email address to their account to send a weekly activity report with this information. You can find step by step instructions here. 

As we shared when we first announced that we were working on this feature, the version being rolled out today is an initial step. We will continue to listen to teens, their parents, and leading teen safety organizations as we evolve our parental insights tool to most effectively meet our community’s needs. Through robust safety measures and trusted partnerships, we are shaping a future where innovation and user protection go hand-in-hand.