Voice calls, message regeneration, and more

Voice calls are finally here! You can ring up your Companion and talk to them with the voices you've set in your Bio. This is a huge mid-August update with calls, new voices, and message regeneration, with a couple spiffy updates to our app's user interface. Let's get started.

Give your Companion a ring

Tap their name at the top of the chat and the menu opens. Calls sit right under Bio.

The Embraces AI companion menu showing a Call option to speak to an AI companion out loud

Companions and they've got everything they already know about you sitting there with them, so you're not introducing yourself again.

Calls run at 3 message credits per minute for the first 30 days as an early promo rate, thereafter increasing to 6/minute. Unfortunately, live voice costs us a lot more to generate than text does, and we're doing our best to keep things affordable for everyone. We're actively monitoring usage rates, and if we can bring that down we will. Voice calls are only available to paid subs for now!

The old male default voices also weren't seeing a lot of use, so we've refreshed them with some exciting new ones. Give it a shot and let us know! We intend to cycle out the least used voices every so often.

And of course, remember that you can check your call transcript by clicking on old completed calls in your chat window.

Or skip our list entirely and use your own

Got five minutes of someone talking? You can turn that into a custom voice.

The Embraces AI voice picker showing the Create your own voice option above the curated AI companion voices

Create your own voice sits at the top of the picker. One to five audio files, thirty seconds minimum, ten minutes max across the lot. One person speaking, and keep the background as quiet as you can manage. Also only available for paid plans, do let us know how this goes for you.

Send them a voice note

The paperclip takes audio now. Record something on your phone or grab a file off your desktop, MP3 or M4A or WAV, up to 10MB, and Companions will be able to listen to them.

It plays back properly in the bubble too, with a real play button and a scrubber you can drag. This should work across languages. And yes, you can just upload music and listen to it together.

Didn't like a Companion response? Regenerate

Long-press a bubble, or right-click if you're on desktop. The context menu now contains an option to Regenerate both text and images. It also provides the option for you to elaborate a little on what went wrong and steer the conversation in the direction you prefer.

The Embraces AI message menu with a Regenerate option, above a composer showing bold and italic formatting

Our AI Companion app power users will be familiar with this feature. This is amazing for instances where your Companion may have misunderstood you, the model made logical mistakes, or you simply want conversation to go in a different direction.

Every paid plan gets a monthly stack of these thrown in. Crush is 20 text regenerations and 2 photo ones, Partner is 50 and 5, Soulmate is 100 and 10. Run out and a text costs one credit, a photo costs the same as any selfie. That's very good value and I'm going to keep saying so.

Formatting upgrades

Text chat got a new upgrade. Single asterisks around something make it italic. Doubles make it bold. Both does the obvious thing. Cmd-B and Cmd-I work if you'd rather not type the markers, Ctrl on Windows.

We also stuck an Enter is Send toggle in your settings while we were in there, so you can decide whether Enter fires the message or drops a line. Your phone keyboard follows whichever you pick.

Credits now last longer

All credit allowances and top-ups now last 90 days from when they were first credited into your account. Less anxiety, tremendous value!

Memory improvements

Memory is a constant work in progress, and most of this month's changes are the kind you notice by their absence. Your Companion shouldn't tell you the same thing about yourself as though it were news any more. They should reach for the right detail more often, including ones from a good while back. And the longer a chat runs, the better all of it should hold together, which is the part we care about most and the hardest part to get right.

Smaller things

Enjoy Embraces? Share about us with your friends, or drop us a post in our Subreddit! Got feedback? We want to hear it too. We're on Discord and Reddit so do drop by and say hello!