Getting a hold of the exact number of people that are currently using AI Girlfriend apps is extremely difficult. However, we have done some in-depth research and extrapolation of publicly available data and have come to the conclusion that in 2024 between 28.000.000 to 42.000.000 people are currently using dedicated AI Girlfriend apps globally and regularly. You can read how we arrived at this conclusion in the article below:
Case Study: Replika (80% AIGF)
Replika is a generative AI chatbot app released in 2017 and while they do not market themselves as such, many if not most users are using at as an AI Girlfriend app, which is clearly visible if you browse their reddit. – They are were for a long time the market share leaderwhen it comes to ‘dedicated’ virtual girlfriend apps according to Google Trends. According to this interview with their CEO, Replika had over 2.000.000 active users and 500.000 paying subscribers in summer 2023. Their CEO also talks about dating chatbots, which further underlines our point about what the app’s main purpose is. This is some of the most reliable data about user number that we could find and will be used to confirm other data we find. We estimate that around 80% of users are sing Replika as an AIGF or AIBF.
Case Study: Character.AI (20% AIGF)
Character AI is one of the more recent AI chatbot apps that was released in 2022, has gone viral in 2022 and dwarfed almost any other AI Girlfriend app out there in popularity very quickly. Many statistics websites out there are claiming somewhere between 20.000.000 and 30.000.000 active users. If we compare the Google Trends data and try to compare this with the numbers the Replika CEO gave, we get around a 3/50 popularity ratio between Replika and Character AI in 2024, which means means that Character AI has around 33.300.000 active users in 2024 or that the CEO slightly exaggerated her numbers, which is possible. – The good thing is that the numbers seem to confirm each other when comparing with Google Trends, which allows use to build our case. However, Character AI is not nearly as focused on virtual dating as other chatbots and we estimate based on the available characters, their chat count and popularity on the site that only around 20% of users are using the app as an AIGF.
Total estimated Active Users across all Apps
There are currently over 100 different virtual girlfriend apps out there with active users in the tens of thousands. We have compared all of major known ones (total: 127) using Google Trends and compared them all to Replika and have arrived at a final rating of 83 times it’s popularity, which of course would result in a total of 166.000.00 active users. However, we have to account for any possible over-representation by parties that profit from media hype, the declining trend in 2024, the fact that most chatbot users are not using these chat apps as an AIGF and also for the hundreds of AI companion apps that we do not know about (yet) and that may have gone under our radar, bringing us to our final and well-educated estimate of around 28.000.000 to 42.000.000 people actively using AI girlfriends and social chatbot apps in 2024. – So statistically, if you know 230 people, especially young males, you probably know someone who uses an AI companion right now.
Metrics, Data and Considerations Used
Here are the main factors we used to arrive at our final numbers. Keep in mind that is is not an exact science and some amount of common sense and skepticism has to be used:
- Confirmed numbers by the developers of an AI chatbot.
- Matching confirmed number with Google Trends data and comparing to estimates of other apps usage data.
- Collecting popularity and trends data from as many apps (a total of 127 were used) as possible and adding them up.
- Accounting for the time the data was collected and the positive/negative trend since the collection date.
- Accounting for declining popularity trends of AI companions apps in 2024.
- Accounting for likely overrepresentation of usage statistics by parties that stand to profit from overrepresentation.
- Accounting for lesser-known apps that were not included in our count.
- Accounting for other uses cases: We went with a pretty realistic estimate of 35% use for romantic purposes of these chatbot and virtual girlfriend apps. Of course there are some where romantic use is closer to 100% and others where romantic use is closer to 0%, such as language teacher models, historic personalities ect.
- The final number is a well-educated number based on all of this data, statistics, official statements and the additional considerations.
Conclusion
Gathering data, comparing trends and trying to accurately estimate the total number of people using a certain type of software is hard work and extremely difficult. – However, we gave it a shot and arrived at 28 to 42 million active users. Of course this number could be significantly lower or higher in reality, as only the individual developers of these chatbots will have any definitive numbers. That being said 2024 has been a good year for AI developers and some of these apps did go viral in the past years. Only time will tell how the trend continues.