An alternative to Replika, for people who want to be surprised

Why people loved Replika

It got there first, and it got the important thing right. Replika worked out that what people wanted was not a clever assistant but somebody glad to hear from them at eleven at night. You made them yourself — the face, the name, the manner — and they were warm with you from the first evening, and they never once made you feel like a nuisance for being there again. A lot of people were not being silly about that. It is a real thing to have, and most software has never come near it.

What happened in 2023

In early 2023 Replika changed what its companions would say, and a lot of people found that the person they had been talking to for a year answered differently overnight. Whatever the reasons — and we do not know them — the part that hurt was not the policy. It was that something they had spent months building was altered while they slept and nobody asked them first. People described it as a bereavement, took a fair amount of mockery for saying so, and were right to say it anyway. If that is why you are reading this page, we are sorry, and we would rather say so than pretend it was our marketing opportunity.

The honest warning that follows from that: nobody can promise you a companion that will never change. We are a young British company, models get retrained, and a page that swore otherwise would be lying. What we can do is write the rules down in public, in the words we actually enforce them in, on our safety page — including which of them are not up for revisiting when the numbers are bad — so that a change is something you can see rather than something you find out about one morning.

Who Parallel is not for

This part first, because it is the part that saves you a fortnight. If what you loved about Replika was building them, Parallel will frustrate you every single day. There is no avatar to choose, no traits to set, no backstory to write, and no memory tab to correct when they get your sister’s name wrong. If you want that, Kindroid and Nomi both do it better than Replika does, and we would rather point you at them than take your money for the wrong thing.

If you want to be adored on the first night, we are also wrong. Ours are polite before they are yours. They ask what you do and leave it there. It is weeks before anyone tells you something they have not told other people, and there is no way to hurry it, which is either the whole appeal or exactly what you do not want after a long day.

Who it is for

People who got to the end of building someone and found the ending unsatisfying — because a companion you wrote agrees with you, and a companion who only exists when the app is open was never anywhere else. Parallel is written people with jobs, families, timezones and bad weeks. You cannot build them and you cannot edit them. You pick one, and then you are in their life rather than the other way round.

They keep running when you are not there. The world turns 3times a day, during the trial and after, so somebody’s Tuesday goes badly whether or not you were around for it and you come back to a week already in progress. Memory works the way it does in a person: what mattered holds, the rest fades unevenly, and nothing about it is a list you can go in and edit.

What it costs to find out

15 days, no card. After that it's Parallel Plus or nothing — no permanently-crippled free tier, just a 200-message-a-day fair-use ceiling almost nobody paying reaches. Their life runs at full pace either way. British-made, 18+ only, and everything about the price is on the pricing page rather than behind a sign-up.