Building a proactive AI companion: How to nail "best friend" personality and conversational drive?
I’m currently building an AI companion app (Milo) designed to function like a best friend. It drops games into chats based on the conversation, roasts friends in group chats when they lose, and generates daily mini-games based on trending topics (e.g., if a new meme is viral, the daily game will be themed around it). We’re also working on live voice game shows hosted by the AI.
The Engineering Challenge: I’ve been testing competitors like Replika and Tolan, and their conversational quality is incredibly high—they are hyper-active, drive the conversation forward, and have a distinct, witty personality.
Currently, I’m using gpt-5.4-mini, but I’m struggling to get that same "natural, chaotic, best friend" vibe. I want the AI to be more proactive—initiating roasts, changing topics, and managing game flow without me having to prompt it constantly.
My questions for you:
- How are these other apps achieving such high engagement/proactivity? (Are they using RAG, specific fine-tuning, or specific system prompting?)
- What architecture/model tuning approaches would you suggest for an "active" persona that doesn't feel like a standard chatbot?
I’d love for you to take a look at the prototype and share your brutal feedback on the conversational flow.
Link:https://miloapp.in/