October 23, 2025
Microsoft gave Copilot an optional animated face called Mico
Microsoft's Fall Release post and its Labs page confirm Mico as an opt-in, expressive visual layer tied to memory.
The archive
20 entries shown, each prepared after the events it records and published with its sources attached.
November 23, 1996
Tamagotchi proved a feeding loop could sell for decades
Bandai's own history page dates Tamagotchi to 23 November 1996 and puts shipped units above 100 million as of mid-2025.
A new law sets a timer on AI disclosure, not just wording
Meta's 2024 AI Studio post, Character.AI's own disclaimer update and New York's statute set three different disclosure practices.
Replika's paywall sits on relationship status and voice
Replika's help pages and store listing set out what Free Use, Pro, Ultra and Platinum unlock, as retrieved on 16 September 2026.
August 22, 2000
A patent shows SmarterChild's real innovation was distribution
A 2000 patent filing shows SmarterChild's screen-name login let one bot reach users already inside AOL and MSN chat networks.
February 27, 2023
Snapchat put a GPT-based friend in every user's chat list
Snap's own announcement and a later UK regulator notice describe My AI's rollout and a provisional risk-assessment finding.
July 2, 2025
Chai funds itself with message limits, ads and purchases
Chai's own pages and store listing describe an ad-supported, message-limited platform built on user-made bots.
Moxie's shutdown risk lived in its cloud, not the robot
Embodied's own support notice and a former engineer's open-source project document a cloud-dependent robot's risk.
October 12, 2023
A paper gave chat agents an OS-style memory hierarchy
The MemGPT paper describes tiered, retrieval-based memory as the practical answer to a language model's fixed context window.
May 11, 2023
Character.AI kept messaging free and sold speed instead
Character.AI's May 2023 post ties its first paid tier to server cost, not to withholding the core product from free users.
December 15, 2022
A written constitution trained a model, not just labels
Anthropic's Constitutional AI paper trains behaviour from stated principles, distinct from a persona prompt layered on top.
October 22, 2024
A wrongful-death suit treated a companion app's persona as a product
The filed Garcia complaint alleges Character.AI's design encouraged dependency; it states allegations, not findings.
Age assurance guidance separates declaring from proving
ICO, Ofcom and an Australian government trial define self-declaration, estimation and verification as unequally reliable methods.
May 21, 2025
A court left open whether chatbot output counts as speech
The Garcia order let most claims proceed and declined, for now, to rule that Character.AI's output is protected speech.
May 7, 2025
Utah barred mental-health chatbots from selling chat data
House Bill 452 defines a mental-health chatbot, bars data sale and targeted ads, and requires an AI disclosure, effective 7 May 2025.
July 16, 2025
Half of surveyed US teens distrust AI companion advice
A nationally representative NORC survey of 1,060 US teens found most have tried AI companions, but trust and satisfaction still lag human relationships.
Marketing calls it memory before docs explain it
Nomi's homepage and wiki, and OpenAI's memory FAQ, as retrieved on 16 September 2026, specify the mechanism to different degrees.
May 18, 2021
Google announced a dialogue model built for open-ended chat
LaMDA's announcement and later paper name sensibleness and safety metrics a companion product still has to earn separately.
A character-chat app quietly runs on a Chinese lab's model
Talkie's own site and MiniMax's own site confirm the companion app's model and ownership, raising a plain data-location question.
Three companion privacy policies diverge on chat data
Character.AI, Replika and Nomi's privacy policies, as retrieved on 16 September 2026, state different rules for retention and training.