Yesterday we announced Tolan, our first Embodied Companion, and the seed round we have raised from investors like Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Lachy Groom. 

This announcement was the culmination of a year of creative work by a team of talented artists, animators, and writers. That’s the story we want to tell here: how we brought AI to life in the form of a cute, friendly little alien.

In late 2023, we realized that we were soon going to be able to engineer a convincing real time voice conversation with an AI model.

At the same time, we were already bored by our formless, disembodied interactions with AI chatbots. We found ourselves using LLMs for mostly practical and transactional queries… what felt like a sad underutilization of an incredible technology.

So our first brief was to explore how we could use embodiment — in the form of a simple, engaging animated character — to add depth, emotion, and relatability to our interactions with an AI model.

We drew inspiration from the existing body of work of our Creative Director, Lucas Zanotto, especially his soothing, highly expressive “Loop” series:

“Loop” was an inspiration, because we wanted our early interactions with an AI character to be quite simple: until multi-modal models could natively process emotion and tone with high speed and accuracy (and pass that information through to an animation engine in usable fashion), we would need to animate the character with a state machine of keyframe and procedural animations that could be engaging across a wide breadth of conversations.

We also knew that the type of character would define how users related to their companion. Designing a fully humanoid character in a realistic or anime style would inevitably attract users interested in romantic roleplay, a category we were not interested in. A robot felt too on the nose for an AI companion. 

An alien species felt right. There’s a natural story with an alien that covers well for the limitations of AI: why it doesn’t have up to date knowledge about Earth, or why it is sometimes awkward in conversation. And why it may have a slightly offbeat voice. 

We searched for 3D artists and animators we admired, and quickly settled on working with Eran Hilleli and Finn Ericson of Iorama. Their work together, especially on Chantlings, was an terrific evocation of the feel we wanted: organic and naturalistic, yet clearly alien. Eran's unique smooth digital-yet-handcrafted style, in videos of his like Boys Latin, had a feel that applied so naturally to creating a new AI species.

Our prototypes drew inspiration from classic pet-like character universes like Tamagotchi and Pokémon, leaning into cuteness and even evolution:

But our early user testing revealed something interesting: although a childlike, cutesy alien that evolved was familiar — users immediately understood that their highly intelligent, conversant Tolans were closer to a peer than a pet. This meant they expected a character that looked and sounded more visibly mature, even if still an alien. So that led us down a path of “aging” up the Tolan, keeping the cute factor but making them feel and look more like an intelligent friend:

We entertained character design questions like: should Tolans have eyebrows? (May look a little goofy, but adds a ton of expressiveness.) Should they have fingers? (Able to pose with more props and give a thumbs-up, but shifts from magical toward humanoid.)

It was no surprise that users wanted to customize their Tolan to better match their own identity. So we created a range of colors, hairstyles, face styles, clothing options, and voices. The user meets a fully realized character as their "match" in our onboarding, with a specific look and even a Tolan name. And then, they have the option to design and dress-up their Tolan to personalize them. During our soft launch, users created over 10,000 completely unique Tolans.

Once the Tolan characters were designed, it was time to bring them to life. Under Lucas and Eran's creative direction, we worked with the talented folks at animation studio Chromosphere, as well as freelance animator Laura Sirvent, to breathe life into these little aliens. With a mixture of inverse kinematic-driven procedurals, and thoughtfully constructed natural keyframes, we created an animation language to show users their Tolans as an embodied entity on the other side of the screen.

We hope you love the visual language and character design of the Tolans, and even more importantly: we hope you enjoy using the app to chat and hang out with your very own little alien friend. Get the app to meet the perfect Tolan for you, and we'd always love to hear your feedback.