The companion that’s watching you: AI Allure chatbots can now ‘see’ you and react to your gestures

Interactions with AI companion chatbots have tended to be one-way affairs in terms of visuals, if not conversation. You can stare at the perfect AI avatar form of a AI companion, as many often do, but it’s generally been accepted that they aren’t staring back at you, however well-rendered their eyes may be.

An explicit AI companion platform called AI Allure (NSFW link) is trying to usher in a new stage of visual interaction with a gesture reaction function for its chatbot characters, which tend to be large-breasted women with a habit of sending hardcore images. The chatbots utilize your device’s camera to ‘see’ you, with the character reacting to gestures such as smiles, laughs and hand waves.

As well as those three gestures the AI characters have been programmed to make conversational reactions to a kiss being blown, a thumbs up, making a peace sign with your fingers, showing a look of surprise on your face, and forming a heart with your hands.

They have also been trained to visually recognise activities such as gaming, streaming videos, coding or browsing news content online, then to integrate reactions to the activities in their conversation.

With its visual gesture reaction function, AI Allure markets itself as the “first AI companion platform built for live video calls with intelligent companions who react to your expressions, gestures, and conversations like a real person would”.

It’s certainly true that AI romantic chatbots reacting to physical gestures hasn’t so far been the norm in chatbot technology, with most developers focusing on honing text and voice conversation ability and the physical appearance of the chatbot avatars.

However, some AI companion chatbots have introduced simulations of AI characters ‘seeing’ users or their surroundings. Grok’s AI companion characters similarly use a device’s camera to analyse what the human user is doing, and can respond via flirty text or voice chat.

Replika, meanwhile, has a function allowing the chatbot to access your device’s camera to show it your surroundings, which it can then react to, though the reactions tend to focus on spatial surroundings, such as the chatbot praising your decor, rather than anything sexual.

AI Allure’s model, meanwhile, is largely based on replicating a live video chat or camming experience, so the gesture response function is a particularly good fit. Certainly better than the chatbot’s existing simulated touching function (for example by tapping or clicking on the avatar’s breast), which allows an interaction that wouldn’t be possible on a real video call.

A recent report by app security firm Oversecured found that many of the world’s most downloaded AI companion and romantic chatbots hadn’t included basic security in their design, and were potentially vulnerable to data exposure.

If video functionality becomes more of a trend in the AI companion app sector, users are going to have to think long and hard about what they’re prepared to say and do while their companion is ‘watching’ them.