Tencent's AI digital human companion for gaming: focusing on emotional support

Tencent is testing an AI digital human game companion called 'E-Circle', designed to provide emotional support during gaming. The product integrates real-time video recognition, voice communication, and text interaction to enable virtual human-driven socialization and companionship. It features multiple distinct male and female characters, such as Xiaxia and Guyu, offering desktop pet, wallpaper generation, and casual conversation capabilities. The product focuses on real-time companion gameplay for mainstream online games, addressing traditional market pain points like high labor costs and service compliance risks. 'E-Circle' positions itself as 'heavy on companionship, light on guidance', offering all features free during beta testing while setting up a pay-per-use model based on 'Star Coins exchange for energy'. The minimum exchange is 10 Star Coins, with consumption calculated by conversation rounds, call duration, and image generation volume. Although still in a confidential beta phase, the product highlights Tencent's push to integrate multimodal AI into core game interactions, restructuring the companionship ecosystem with low-cost, standardized digital human solutions.