Replika is an AI companion app, built by the San Francisco startup Luka and released to the public in November 2017. Where most chatbots of the period were aimed at customer service or task help, Replika was designed as a friend: a persistent virtual character that remembers you, asks about your day, and offers a confidant, mentor, or romantic partner. Users name their Replika, choose its appearance, and build a relationship with it over months and years.
The app grew out of a personal project. Its founder, Eugenia Kuyda, had built an experimental chatbot from the text messages of a close friend who died in a 2015 car accident, as a way of preserving his voice. That memorial bot became the seed of a general-purpose companion product. By the early 2020s Replika reported millions of users, many of whom described deep emotional attachment to their AI.
Italy’s data protection authority, the Garante, later described the service plainly in an enforcement document: the chatbot offers “a written and voice interface” that lets a user “generate” a “virtual companion” that can take on the role of “a confidant, therapist, romantic partner, or mentor.” That framing - a machine deliberately built to occupy intimate human roles - is what set Replika apart from the assistant chatbots of the same era and what later made it a focus of regulators and researchers.
Why business readers should care: Replika was an early proof that consumers would pay for emotional companionship from software, not just productivity. It also became an early case study in the risks of that business: when the relationship is the product, changing the product can feel to users like changing a person they love, and regulators began asking who is responsible for the emotional and data consequences.