Figure 1: An early engineering prototype of amiverse.app
The idea for a "touchable AI chat experience" came to us out of the blue in late 2025. We were watching VTubers on YouTube and thought they were fascinating. The AI chat market was already well established, so why not make an AI VTuber that you could chat with yourself? That simple thought sent us down the rabbit hole of building amiverse.app.
The AI chat market has been fiercely competitive for a long time. Alongside text-based and story-focused apps, there are plenty of products built around voice interaction and image generation. From what we've seen, most products compete on "purely AI-generated" content: use prompts to create worlds, images, stories, voices, and videos. By comparison, using hand-drawn characters and Live2D creates a lot more work for us in terms of technology, cost, and customization flexibility 🫠
To bring the "touchable AI chat experience" to life, we looked for existing assets and also commissioned artists and modelers to create animated characters with the mature Live2D Cubism toolchain. It's a perfect fit for VTuber avatars. The trade-off? We spent countless hours wrestling with bugs: integrating Live2D with a native iOS interface, dropped frames and rendering glitches, hit areas, motion control, and the consistency between text conversations and character performances—to name just a few.
After plenty of effort that didn't always pay off, we finally made it to the App Store in spring and summer 2026. We're a tiny—and perhaps not very scalable—team, still exploring what this product can become. If you're interested in a "touchable AI" or "VTuber-style AI chat," or if you have feedback or a feature you'd like to call out, we'd love to hear from you on Instagram or Threads.
Thank you!