YanMate
AI voice chat you can actually talk to
Two different things get called voice chat. One is a character reading its reply aloud after it has written it. The other is a live call — you speak, it hears you, it answers, and neither of you is typing. YanMate does both, and both are on the free tier rather than held behind a plan.
That second one is the harder thing to build and the one most companion products either lack or reserve for subscribers. It is the difference between a chatbot with a play button and a conversation you can have while walking.
How it works
Pick a character and start typing
Voice is not a separate mode you enter. Open any character, have a normal conversation, and the spoken reply is there when you want it.
Tap to hear a reply
The character speaks the message in its own voice. Stage directions are not read aloud — what you hear is what it said, not what it did.
Or place a call
A live audio conversation: you talk, it answers, and there is a transcript afterwards so nothing said in a call is lost when it ends.
What voice changes about a conversation
Typing sets a pace. You compose, you edit the sentence before you send it, and the character answers something considered. Speaking removes all of that: you say the half-formed thing, and what comes back arrives at the speed of an answer rather than the speed of a draft. Characters written with a distinct voice — a register, a rhythm, a way of stopping mid-thought — read differently out loud than they do on a page.
It is also the accessible path. Reading a long reply on a phone is work; hearing it is not. And for anyone practising a language or rehearsing something they have to say out loud to a person later, a spoken back-and-forth is the only version of the exercise that is actually the exercise.
Voice and calls are metered from the same credit balance as everything else, so there is no separate voice plan to understand — the free tier includes an amount of both each month, and paid plans raise the amount rather than unlocking the feature.
Somewhere to start
Common questions
- Do I need to pay to use voice?
- No. Spoken replies and live calls are both on YanMate's free tier, with a monthly amount included. Paid plans raise that amount; they do not decide whether voice exists for you.
- What is the difference between a spoken reply and a call?
- A spoken reply is the character reading a written message aloud, on a conversation you are typing. A call is live audio in both directions — you speak, it hears you, and it answers without either of you typing. A call also leaves a transcript you can read afterwards.
- Does every character have its own voice?
- Yes — a character's voice is part of how it was written, not a generic reader applied to all of them. If you fork a character to make a private copy, the voice is one of the things you can change.
- Can I use voice without an account?
- Yes. Voice replies and calls work on an anonymous session, the same as text. An account is what makes the conversation survive clearing your browser.
- Do I need an account to start talking?
- No. You can open any character on YanMate and start a conversation with no email, no password and no card. Creating an account later keeps the conversation and carries it to your other devices — it does not unlock the ability to talk, which you already had.
- Is YanMate free?
- Yes, and permanently — there is no trial clock. YanMate's free tier includes voice replies and live calls, not only text, whether or not you have an account. Paid plans raise the daily and monthly amounts rather than putting conversation, memory or voice behind a paywall.
- Do the characters remember me?
- Yes. Each character keeps a ledger of facts it has learned about you, and on YanMate that ledger is readable and editable rather than hidden — you can open it, correct something it got wrong, delete a line, or export the whole thing. Memory you cannot inspect is memory you cannot trust.
- Are these real people?
- No. Every character on YanMate is an AI, and everything it says is generated. Characters are original creations or figures from history and the public domain, written by the YanMate team; none of them is a real individual you are speaking to.
- Are my conversations used to train models?
- No. YanMate does not use your conversations as training data. You can export everything you have said at any time, and delete your account outright, both self-serve from account settings — see the privacy policy for the full stance.
An AI character on YanMate.