Eli Voss

I review AI companion apps for a living, which is a sentence that did not describe a real job three years ago and now describes mine.

Here is how it works. I sign up myself — my own account, no press access, no comped upgrade in exchange for a kind word — and I use the thing properly rather than clicking through it for screenshots. I plant details early in a conversation to see whether they come back later. I count what a picture actually costs in credits. And I go all the way to the checkout page and read it before closing the tab, because that is where the answer to “will anyone see this on my statement” is usually hiding, and most apps would rather you found out afterwards.

Then I write down what happened, including the parts that are inconvenient for a site that earns a commission when you sign up.

What I am actually looking for

The pictures are not the hard part any more, and that is the thing I did not expect. Photorealistic renders in five seconds are ordinary now. What still separates these apps is whether the companion is the same person in the second image as the first, and whether she remembers what you told her an hour ago. Those two things decide whether you are still subscribed in month three, which is why our scorecard weights conversation and memory heaviest.

I am, genuinely, a little amazed by how fast this happened. Two years ago this category could not hold a name across a page refresh. Last week an app handed me back a guitar model and a dog’s name I had mentioned in passing, folded into an unrelated sentence, without being prompted. That is not a small thing, and I would rather write about it honestly than pretend to be too cool for it.

What you can expect from a review here

Every number in one is something I saw on screen. If I did not measure it, it is not in there — no plausible-sounding estimates, no repeating a claim from a press release. Where something is unknown, the review says so, which is less satisfying to read and considerably more useful.

I will tell you which app is best and which one is the better deal, because those are frequently not the same app. And I will tell you what to switch off in the settings within the first five minutes, because nobody else seems to.

Eli Voss is a pen name. In a category where discretion is half the product, it would be strange to demand it from the apps and not practise it ourselves — but there is one real person behind every test on this site, and the byline is accountable for all of it.