Nov 13, 2024 4 min read

The Next Chapter: Character.AI Roadmap

Character.AI exists because of you — the community of users who have spent hours creating, role-playing, and storytelling.

You’ve also given us a lot of feedback on the product and experience. We want you to know we are listening.

Our goal is to provide a creative space that is engaging, immersive, and safe. We are always working toward achieving that balance which means we’re going to periodically change our policies.

This roadmap represents our commitment to transparency, innovation, and collaboration. We’re excited about the future of Character.AI and look forward to building it with you. Your support and feedback are the driving forces behind our progress, and we can’t wait to see where this journey takes us!

As we continue to innovate and grow, we want to keep you in the loop about our strategic goals and development priorities. Our roadmap highlights the key areas we're focusing on to enhance your experience and push the boundaries of what’s possible with conversational AI.

1. Safety

We believe that the Character.AI experience should be safe for all users. That’s why we are rolling out a number of safety features, including ones that aim to create a different experience for users under 18 years old. These new initiatives include:

A separate model for users under the age of 18 with stricter guidelines.
Improved detection, response, and intervention related to user inputs that violate our Terms of Service or Community Guidelines
A revised disclaimer on every chat to remind users that the AI is not a real person.
Notification when a user has spent an hour-long session on the platform, with additional user controls in progress to allow adult users to customize this feature.

Our goal is to carefully design our policies to promote safety, avoid harm, and prioritize the well-being of our community. We’ll also align our product development to those policies, using them as a north star to prioritize safety as our products evolve.

2. Enhanced Conversational Abilities

We are committed to improving Character quality for all users by refining the natural language understanding and generation capabilities of our AI models. This includes:

Increasing Memory/Context limits
More immersive conversations and stories
Improved quality around repetition and Character consistency

3. User Requests + New Features

Our community is an essential part of our product development. Listening to and incorporating your feedback is one of our top priorities. Over the next few months, we will introduce more ways for you to request and vote for features. Building on community-favorite features like the Edit Button, Personas, Pinned Memories, Duplicate Chats, and others… We are committed to delivering more of your top requested features over the next few months. Please note that as we implement new updates, we may also roll out experiments that are not always announced and subject to change. While we won’t be able to implement every suggestion, we will do our best to put the community at the forefront of our developments.

4. Community Engagement and Communication

We believe in building Character.AI alongside our community. We are creating more opportunities to connect with other Creators and users, provide feedback directly to our team, and participate in exciting events and contests. Look forward to:

Community Announcements: We know how much communication is important to you and just as we recently brought back monthly Community Updates, our goal is to increase the frequency and depth of our communication to keep you well-informed on all that we’re working on.
Events: More Creator challenges, community contests, feedback events, and in-person gatherings.
Creator’s Club: We’ve launched an exclusive space for Character Creators and our most passionate users and will continue introducing new initiatives to support our amazing Creators who bring our platform to life.

5. Service Stability

Service reliability and performance are the core of the user experience. Looking back, we’ve resolved major scalability issues, sharply decreased waiting room percentage, and reduced the occurrence of full-site outages.

We are not stopping here. With our renewed focus on reliability and performance, our latest initiatives will:

Enhance internal observability of the service so that our team is automatically alerted for major and minor site issues. This will help us to address the issues quickly and keep the community informed promptly.
Standardize incident responses to help keep the community updated on the issue and the resolution.
Implement new metrics to track load times, latency, and performance to help us improve your overall experience on the website and mobile app.
Further reduce outages and downtime. We achieved an 85% reduction in outages from last year and are committed to strengthening server stability to reduce the likelihood of waiting rooms and interruptions.

Your Role in Our Journey

We want you to be an active participant in this journey. Your feedback and engagement are vital to shaping the future of Character.AI. Here’s how you can get involved:

Participate in Community Discussions: Engage in discussions on our Discord and Reddit to share your thoughts and connect with fellow users.
Join Our Beta Programs: Test new features and provide valuable insights before they’re released to the public. We will be periodically launching Testing Programs and would greatly appreciate your participation and feedback. Please join our Discord and get the Beta Tester role to be notified of future testing projects.
Provide Regular Feedback: Use our #Feedback channel on Discord to share your experiences and suggestions directly with our team.
Model Quality Rating: Detailed feedback and ratings in your conversations are an essential part of our model improvements. Read more about how you can help in our blog post here.

Looking Ahead

Thank you for being a part of the Character.AI community. Together, let's shape the future of conversational AI!