Boyfriend Maker is a
dating sim
Dating sims, also known as dating simulation games, are a video game subgenre of simulation games with romantic elements. While resembling the visual novel genre in presentation, true dating sims utilize an additional statistical and time manage ...
, romance
chatbot
A chatbot (originally chatterbot) is a software application or web interface designed to have textual or spoken conversations. Modern chatbots are typically online and use generative artificial intelligence systems that are capable of main ...
smartphone app for
iOS
Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...
(
iPhone
The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company's own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at ...
) and
Android devices, developed by Japanese studio
36 You Games (styled as 36You) and distributed under the
freemium
Freemium, a portmanteau of the words "free" and "premium", is a pricing strategy by which a basic product or service is provided free of charge, but money (a premium) is charged for additional features, services, or virtual (online) or physical ( ...
business model. Boyfriend Maker incorporated advanced artificial intelligence chat technology a decade before products such as
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and released on November 30, 2022. It uses large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4o as well as other Multimodal learning, multimodal models to create human-like re ...
. According to the developer's website, Boyfriend Maker is an "app that lets you interact and chat with quirky
virtual boyfriends".
While each virtual boyfriend has certain unique characteristics, the various instances of the boyfriend are powered by a chat engine, that (at least within a language and market) can utilise vocabulary and knowledge acquired in a chat with one user in subsequent chats with other users.
Gameplay
Users gain
experience point
An experience point (often abbreviated as exp or XP) is a unit of measurement used in some tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) and role-playing video games to quantify a player character's life experience and progression through the game. Experien ...
s and in-game coins. Users can customize their virtual boyfriend's appearance by selecting items such as hair, clothing, face, and a necklace.
Apple delisting and reintroduction
In late November 2012, the original iOS Boyfriend Maker app was delisted from the Apple
App Store
An app store, also called an app marketplace or app catalog, is a type of digital distribution platform for computer software called applications, often in a mobile context. Apps provide a specific set of functions which, by definition, do not i ...
due to "
ribald" chat, according to the New York Times.
Boyfriend Maker was removed by Apple due to "reports of references to violent sexual acts and pedophilia".
Boyfriend Maker had an age rating of 4+, even though the chat bot "responds with often strange and explicit text unsuitable for young children".
User-posted chat excerpts indicate that the virtual boyfriend would sometimes transition abruptly to sexual chat in response to a seemingly innocent question. In one user-posted example, in response to the question, "what kind of wedding cake will we have" the boyfriend responds, "a good sex ima be on top of u u gonna ride oon me bitin the pillow gurrl ima fuck da shit out of u". The developer's use of the
SimSimi-created third-party chat engine may be responsible for the sexual text.
As the virtual boyfriend converses with human users, the SimSimi chat engine acquires vocabulary from users of the game and applies this "learned" vocabulary in chats with other users. The chat engine might also employ lines harvested from human-human chat logs, song lyrics, movies or TV shows.
In April 2013, a detuned and presumably tamer version of the app, titled Boyfriend Plus, was permitted on Apple's App Store.
See also
*
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...
*
Bondee
*
Character.ai
*
Natural language processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...
*
Natural language understanding
*
Natural language generation
Natural language generation (NLG) is a software process that produces natural language output. A widely cited survey of NLG methods describes NLG as "the subfield of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics that is concerned with the ...
*
Replika
Replika is a generative AI chatbot app released in November 2017. The chatbot is trained by having the user answer a series of questions to create a specific neural network. The chatbot operates on a freemium pricing strategy, with roughly 25% ...
*
SimSimi
References
{{reflist
2012 video games
Android (operating system) games
Chatbots
Dating sims
IOS games
Video games developed in Japan