The AI Alien Companion App That's Bringing In $4M a Year (Best of the Pod)

LLMs are a new medium for storytelling.That’s according to the creators of Portola, the company behind Tolan: an embodied AI companion that lives on its own planet and chats to you with a distinct personality. In 2025, Portola's founder and CEO Quinten Farmer and Head of Story Eliot Peper joined Dan Shipper to explain how they’re building this new medium from scratch. Their aim is to help users go from overwhelmed to grounded through conversations with Tolan that feel personal and spontaneous, not scripted. On this week’s AI & I, Dan revisits his conversation with Quinten and Eliot. They discuss why response time is everything for voice-based AI interfaces, how Portola designs AI personalities users will click with, and why character-driven AI could become a new computing interface. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!To hear more from Dan Shipper:Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribeFollow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipperGo to https://attio.com/every and get 15% off your first year.Timestamps: 00:01:30 - Introduction 00:04:07 - Talking to the Portola CEO's Tolan, Clarence 00:09:11 - How Portola went from building software for kids to AI companions 00:23:40 - Why response time is everything for voice-based AI interfaces 00:29:54 - Tolans don't use scripted prompts—they're taught to improvise 00:37:23 - How to know which AI personalities your users will click with 00:42:27 - Developing the character traits of an AI companion 00:49:48 - What does it mean to build technology that makes us flourish 01:01:10 - How Portola evaluates whether Tolans are resonating with users 01:11:01 - Inside Portola's viral growth strategy

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(119)

Microsoft’s Vision for an Internet Made for Agents With CTO Kevin Scott (Best of the Pod)

In 2025, Kevin Scott bet that the agentic web would be the next big thing in AI.The Microsoft CTO argued that for agents to be genuinely useful, they'd need to be able to take action on our behalf—whi...

12 Aug 28min

Why the Next Hit AI Product Will Be Social Why the Next Hit AI Product Will Be Social (Best of the Pod)

Most consumer AI so far has been single-player: you and a chatbot, alone.Benchmark partner Sarah Tavel, one of Pinterest's first 30 employees, is betting that's about to change. She's looking for a pr...

5 Aug 48min

Best of the Pod: Wired's Kevin Kelly on Why AI Is a 50-year Overnight Success

Kevin Kelly has spent over 30 years experiencing the edge of new technology: from the earliest days of the internet to the first years of Burning Man. But he’s always treated the frontier as a place t...

29 Jul 53min

How Every's Team Used AI to Ship Its Biggest Launch Ever

Yash Poojary, a growth engineer at Every, dropped an idea for a campaign in Slack at 7 p.m. Instead of building it himself, Every’s head of growth Austin Tedesco took a screenshot of the Slack thread,...

22 Jul 46min

Building a School Where AI Models Learn About Humanity

If scaling laws hold—and Surge AI CEO Edwin Chen believes they do—we’re hurtling toward a future where there’s nothing humans can do that AI can’t do better. When OpenAI’s models disproved an open con...

24 Jun 43min

GitHub’s COO Explains Why AI Hasn’t Replaced Developers

Last year, there were 1 billion commits on GitHub. This year, Kyle Daigle expects that number to exceed 14 billion, a two-component explosion caused by more humans—and their agents—issuing pull reques...

17 Jun 28min

How Anthropic Uses Claude Fable 5 With Mike Krieger

Mike Krieger built one of the most consequential consumer apps of the last two decades as the cofounder of Instagram. He is now at the frontier of AI-native product development as head of Anthropic La...

10 Jun 52min