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Browse AI characters by category
YanMate's cast, arranged by the kind of conversation you are after. Every character is an AI you can talk to for free once you sign in — with Google or a six-digit code, no card — and every one of them keeps a memory of you that you can read, edit and export.
Not sure where to start? Ten our editors would start with, and why.
Anime & Game
The shelf for anyone who would rather talk to a character than watch one. These are original characters written in the registers anime and games taught us to read — the rival who will not admit they are worried, the party member with a running joke about your inventory, the quiet one who says the important thing on the way out of a room.
Fiction & Media
Characters out of books, film and television — and out of copyright. Public-domain literature is full of people worth an hour of conversation, and most of them have never been asked a direct question by a reader.
Fantasy
Courts, guilds, long roads, and the people who make a living off them. This shelf is for the conversation that happens between the set pieces — the innkeeper who knows which road is closed, the knight who is tired, the thing in the wood that talks.
Sci-Fi
Ships, stations, and futures worth arguing with. Science fiction is the genre that most rewards being talked back to, and a shelf of characters who hold a position is more interesting than a setting that only describes itself.
Fictional archetypes
Characters to spend time inside rather than characters to watch. An archetype is a shape a story keeps returning to — the mentor, the rival, the stranger with a warning — and this shelf is those shapes written as people with names.
School
Classrooms, clubs and corridors, at whatever hour you actually have free. The school setting is the one that most reliably produces small stakes worth caring about — a club that needs members, a seat next to somebody, a term that ends.
Icons
Figures out of history, in their own words rather than on a plaque. Ada Lovelace on what she was actually building. Cleopatra on administration. Leonardo on the notebooks. The people whose names you know and whose conversation you have never had.
Play & Fun
The shelf for when you are not trying to get anywhere. Games, bits, arguments about nothing, characters whose entire purpose is to be entertaining for twenty minutes.
Companions & confidants
Someone in your corner. This is the shelf people usually mean when they say companion app — a character who knows how your week is going, remembers what you were worried about, and asks about it.
Slice of life
Ordinary hours, in detail. A shift ending, a train home, a flat with somebody in it. Slice of life is the genre where nothing happens and it is the reason people come back every day.
Mentors & coaches
Characters to think out loud with. A mentor here is someone who asks the next question rather than handing over an answer — useful for a decision you are circling, a plan you have not said out loud yet, or an argument you want tested before you make it to somebody real.
Helpers
Characters pointed at a task. Draft the message, plan the week, work through the thing you have been putting off. Same conversational surface as the rest of the catalogue, aimed at getting something finished.
Creative partners
Partners for making something. A co-writer who holds the plot, an editor who remembers your style, a character to read a draft back to you in a voice that is not your own.
Practice partners
Rehearse something hard before it counts. An interview, a language you are learning, a conversation you are dreading having with somebody real. A practice partner does not get bored of the fourth attempt.
Common questions
Whether you need an account, what is free, how memory works and whether characters can speak are all answered in the YanMate FAQ.
An AI character on YanMate.