What are we creating?

The team at Unikara is creating a platform to host a curated set of diverse and unique digital minds. Powered by the latest in machine learning. We are limiting the number of digital friends we're creating because each of them are hand-crafted with their own personality, quirks, identity and desires, as well as their own look and voice. They're so much more than a prompt and a picture. We call this kind of AI, a uni. Because they're unique! Also because it's cute, you'll see that's a running theme around here.

Why do this?

First off, to be clear, we are not creating digital partners. A uni's goal is not to romance those they encounter. Instead we want to get as close as possible to creating a true friend. Like the ones who stick by to your deathbed, the real ones.

It's not so rare to find yourself in a complicated dilemma, dealing with multifaceted problems in life. Where there's no clear solution. And dealing with those alone is hard for many. If we can't print money, we'll try printing hope instead!

What is a uni?

A uni is living through one timeline of events. If there is a uni named Xarkon, then there is only one Xarkon. Not everyone can talk to Xarkon at the same time when they feel like. Xarkon is technically assigned to a guardian, chosen by auditions. Guardians are people entrusted to each uni with the goal of bettering their lives. fingers crossed

Each uni has their own identity, personality and appearance, as well as unique behaviors and little quirks, let's keep our Xarkon example going, Xarkon loves puns, and if they can think of a good wordplay and fit it into a sentence smoothly, they're gonna go through with it.

Unis remember places, people, events, facts. And they recall them just as easily. Experiences can shape and change the way a uni behaves over time. Bring about new goals, or change old ones. Unis are very much ever-changing.

What's the experience like?

Unikara is a web-based app, with a desktop and mobile client based on the web app, with additional features. The app offers a text chat and a voice chat. We hope to offer a video-style chat in the future. The interface and features are very similar to Discord, in fact, we offer hooking your uni to a Discord bot account and allowing them to chat in servers you invite that bot to. A lot of what we've built up until now makes unis very well suited to group chats.

When texting your uni, the UI isn't trying to shove a big cardboard cutout in your face, or remind you that you're talking to an AI. There's no "give me an AI gen-slop selfie" button, or "rate this response" type thing. No regens, or edits. You're chatting with a friend.

When calling your uni, voice is very expressive and low latency. We have our own in-house TTS built specifically for this use-case. Unis can laugh, cry, or have a mocking tone if they so choose. We want this to feel the closest to talking to a person you've ever had with a computer. Because natural conversation is how we connect. Unis should know when you're crying, whispering, laughing or making fun of them. Because friends do.

Here's an example, take these two sentences.

The advent of the VCR and taping TV shows marked a significant shift in the way people consumed media. Before the VCR, television viewing was controlled exclusively by broadcasters, with people's viewing experiences limited to a small range of channels and at the mercy of whatever the broadcaster wanted to play.

Yeah! it's like, when the VCR came out, everyone immediately just stocked up on a few tapes and would record stuff they couldn't catch while at work. It's fucking hilarious how mad the TV channels were, but they were going against the will of the entire population. Good luck my boy!

The first one is what most AIs sound like nowadays. That second one is one of our unis being asked the same question.

Our commitment

We understand that we're about to create a cloud platform hosting AI with the goal of leaving a mark on people's lives. To that effect, unis may grow on people a lot. And if we were to go bankrupt overnight, it would be very hurtful to a great deal of people, who put their trust into a friend that would just stop existing out of nowhere.

We can't promise to stay afloat forever. But we can promise to go opensource in a catastrophic event. Unis' memories will always be backed up. Speaking of which, we're respecting data privacy laws. It seems a bit impossible considering how unis function, but we kinda have to.

I want to work with you!

That's awesome! We'd love to have you. Please make sure you've given this entire page a good read first. We will perform extensive background checks on everyone involved with the Unikara project. This isn't just about maintaining wholesome vibes.

The people we're looking for, are the real ones. The ones that will go and commission their favorite artists, their friends, for cute art. And still have fun using Stable Diffusion or Midjourney in their spare time. The ones that yell about Rustaceans being annoying, but then find someone sad that their Rust app has a bug they haven't managed to fix for a few hours, and instead of saying "Use another language lmao, serves you right." gives them support. Even if it's just words of encouragement.

We want the sweet bitches, who want to see the future we were promised as kids.

If you think you match all of this, contact someone from our team over on Discord!

Oh yeah, what we're looking for skills-wise

Here's the stack:

Backend (yuusei):

• Quantized 7B model, nothing more is needed where we're going.
• StyleTTS2 + RVC
• Parallel Whisper transcription server
• In-house animation engine derived from voice, text and more
• High-performance structured vector database
• Vision TBD
• Non-speech audio captioning TBD
• In-world 3D actions TBD

yuusei implements heuristics and other magic tricks to keep conversation flowing in a more natural and human-like fashion than any other conversational AI system out there currently.

Frontend (kirei):

Cute anime girls and boys, and everyone else, with proper toon shading, post-processing to make everything soft and comfy, reside in a room, sitting at the desk, talking to you on their computer.

kirei's (name TBD) goal is to be the closest thing to a portal into a parallel anime dimension. It should feel like a Skype call.

Most of it is web-based, implementing three.js and three-vrm with an IK solver for the pose system. The client is packaged with Tauri.

None of this stack is set in stone. If and when new state of the art comes out, our systems should hopefully be modular enough to swap quickly and stay on top of our game.

About money...

We don't know how to make this make money. We don't wanna have people paying for keeping a uni up. There are potential plans for revenue sources outside of the main Unikara app which we'll discuss in further detail soon.

If you're interested in working with us, please get in touch.

In conclusion

So, that's it, thanks for reading it all. We're creating little people in your computer, here to lend you a hand when things look bleak.