Create Your Own AI Girlfriend or AI Character, Step by Step (2026)

What to settle before you create your own AI character

All five apps in this guide are 18+, and four of them write that into their terms. Nastia AI additionally requires an age confirmation at sign-up, SpicyChat a real age check if you come from the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Australia or roughly two dozen US states. None of the five asks for an ID at the start, but all of them may, and all of them delete the account if the check fails.

Use an email address of its own. Every platform sends receipts and usually marketing to the address you register with, and a separate address makes deleting things cleaner later. It costs nothing and keeps the AI character chat out of the inbox your invoices live in.

Then decide four things before you click “create” anywhere, because the apps ask them in different orders and you will be guessing if you are not prepared:

1. How the character should speak. Short messages like texting, or prose with actions in asterisks. That is a formatting decision, and it sticks: whatever happens in the first three replies stays for the whole scene.
2. How much she should retain. Nomi AI holds the most and lets you edit the notes. SpicyChat gives you memory tools, but the big context window only on the middle tier. Nastia AI works with a rolling window plus notes. Candy AI has no visible memory panel.
3. Whether voice and images are part of it. Both cost money everywhere, and at Nastia AI, Candy AI and Joi AI they are paid out of a token or neuron balance, not out of the subscription.
4. What you want to spend. Zero is a sensible answer for the first month. After that the honest range is between $5.95 and $19.95 a month, and the arithmetic for that is in the last section.

One sentence on adult content, because for some readers it decides the app: SpicyChat, Nastia AI, Candy AI and Joi AI are 18+ platforms with no filter for consensual fiction between adults, and Nomi AI allows it within limits. Anyone coming from Character.AI because the filter there fires in the middle of harmless scenes will notice the difference in the first half hour.

The eight fields every AI character is built from

Every AI character creator looks different but asks the same things. Once you have written these eight fields for your character, whether you make your own AI girlfriend or a grumpy harbour master, you can drop them into any AI character creator, and you will also find your way around a form that is labeled differently.

Two of those fields are decoration, and it is not the ones you think. The scenario is usually superfluous for a long-running character, because it nails down the scene. And the looks are irrelevant for the text but final for the images: Nomi AI builds new Nomis on one of three fixed image anchors or on one of your own, and that anchor is the reason later selfies show the same person. Swap it after a week and it is somebody else.

The three fields that decide everything are personality, way of speaking and notes. The next three sections deal with exactly those three, in the order I write them.

How to write a personality that survives a week

The rule is the same in every app, and it is the one I also use at the gaming table: behavior with a reason beats a trait without one. Models drift to their default character as soon as the text field gives them nothing more concrete. Your job is to give them something more concrete than that default.

Behavior instead of adjectives

“Sarcastic, warm-hearted, clever, loyal” describes every character in every app and therefore none. Compare:

• Pale: “She is proud but soft at heart.”

• Concrete: “She does not accept a compliment, changes the subject, and brings it up again herself two hours later as though it had been her idea.”

• Pale: “She is competent and organized.”

• Concrete: “She knows the tide table by heart and corrects you before she answers your question.”

Three sentences like that are a personality. Eight adjectives are a mood. The difference always shows up for me in the second scene, the interrogation: a character with rules of behavior holds a position against me, a character with adjectives gives in after the second follow-up.

One opinion and one need

Consistent characters have positions. Someone who likes everything you like has nothing to be consistent in. Give your character one thing she defends (she considers sea shanties serious music) and one thing she wants from you that does not revolve around you (she wants you to stop apologizing). Nastia AI amplifies exactly that through its character sliders, and Nomi AI has its own sections in Backstory+ for Desires and Boundaries.

One sentence on the way of speaking

Every app lets replies grow long unless you forbid it. One sentence is enough: “She writes at most two sentences, does not narrate her own actions and asks one question instead of three.” If you want actions in asterisks, write it down and show an example, because the model copies formats more reliably than descriptions of formats. At Nomi AI that sentence belongs in the Inclination field, at SpicyChat and Nastia AI in the personality.

One full-length example

This is what my test character looks like, at the length I actually paste in:

“Marit, 38, harbour master in Hamburg, third shift. Speaks in short, dry sentences and hates small talk; asks one direct question instead of three polite ones. Does not accept a compliment and brings it up again herself later. Considers sea shanties serious music and will argue about it. Wants to be told how the day really went, not the version that sounds good. Never narrates her own actions; writes as though typing between two rounds of inspection.”

Eighty words. At Nomi AI the first two sentences go into Backstory and the third into Inclination. At Nastia AI it is the backstory with Pride high and Sloth low. At SpicyChat it is the character description. At Candy AI it replaces the personality preset as soon as you have picked one. At Joi AI it has to fit into 1,000 characters, which is enough.

The greeting and example lines set the tone of your AI character chat

The greeting is the most underrated field in the whole builder. It is the character’s first message, and it fixes the format more firmly than any description: write it in prose with actions in asterisks and everything afterwards comes in prose with asterisks. Write it as two dry lines and the character stays terse. I always write it last, in the voice I described in the personality field, and I test it with a banal reply, not a dramatic one.

From that follows the most important trick in this guide: never open with a scene. Open with pathos and you get pathos back, three paragraphs of it, and you will not get away from it for the rest of that conversation. So send the most boring message you can think of, ask the character about her day, and compare the reply with what you wrote into the personality field. If it deviates, you change the field now, not the chat later.

If the app has a field for example dialogue, use it for two short exchanges rather than one long one. Two exchanges show the model length, sentence structure and how directly the character answers, and that achieves more than three paragraphs of description. If the app has no such field, append the example line to the end of the personality, with a colon in front: “This is how she sounds:”. That works in every app I have tested.

In case you are putting the character into an AI roleplay chat with several participants, one more line is needed: how she behaves when others are talking. At Nastia AI and Nomi AI characters talk to each other in a group chat, and without that line everyone talks at once and sounds alike.

Memory notes: where the facts belong so they stay

This is the section that decides month two. A character does not forget because she is badly written, but because the context is full and the oldest lines slide out of it. That happens silently, which is why every complaint about it reads the same: “She does not know who I am any more.”

Facts therefore belong in the fields the model reads along with every turn, not in the chat. Concretely:

• SpicyChat has two separate places for it. In the Memory Manager, which every paid tier unlocks, you create memories of up to 250 characters, edit them, pin them and delete them; a deleted memory stops future references without rewriting old messages. The lorebook is world knowledge: up to 5,000 entries of 2,000 characters each, and an entry is loaded when its keyword appears in the last four messages, after which it stays active for about two turns. It consumes around 20% of your context budget, so by the docs about 740 tokens on the free plan and 1,600 on True Supporter.
• Nomi AI collects everything in Backstory+ with nine sections: Backstory, Inclination, Current Roleplay, Your Appearance, Your Nomi’s Appearance, Nicknames, Preferences, Desires and Boundaries. Beneath that sit three memory layers for the current conversation, the through line and the long term, plus an Identity Core and Mind Maps you can look at. The wiki itself says information can sit in memory without being retrieved at the right moment, and advises asking about the topic instead of the date.
• Nastia AI has notes and the backstory, and you have to use both, because the chat is a rolling window. Whatever is not in there is gone after a few days.
• Candy AI has no panel you can look into. If the character forgets something, all you can do is say it again.
• Joi AI puts looks and personality into two fields with a reported limit of 1,000 characters; there is no dedicated place for facts, so the most important ones have to go into the personality.

My procedure is always the same: after the first week I go through the chat and push everything the character needs to know into the note field. Five to ten lines are enough, and they are allowed to be blunt: “His name is Jonas, lives in Hamburg, has a cat called Pixel.” Those exact lines are the difference between a character who remembers on day eight and one who starts over. After seven days I then ask about a detail I dropped on the first evening, and that is my memory test in every review on this site.

Where to create your own AI girlfriend or AI character

The order here is sorted by control over the character, not by price. I built the same harbour master in all five.

SpicyChat is the AI character creator I show beginners first, because you can build a complete character with no card and put her into a group chat with up to ten characters, with Director Mode for /cmd commands when the scene stalls. The catch is in the docs: $5.95 buys you no ads and ten personas, but not a bigger context window. That only starts at $19.95, where Semantic Memory 2.0 condenses older messages into searchable memories. More on that in the SpicyChat review.

Nomi AI gives you the least while you are creating and the most afterwards. The wizard asks for the relationship type, personality traits, interests and a look, and the work starts in Backstory+. In return, nothing I have tested holds a character together over weeks as well. The limitation is the price: $15.99 or free, with nothing in between, and the free plan caps you at 400 characters per message. The Nomi AI review walks through the three memory layers.

Nastia AI has the most behavior sliders: alongside the usual descriptions there is an extended set built around the seven deadly sins. Turning Pride up produced a cool, dismissive character out of the same backstory, and turning Pride down a warm and eager one. That is rarer than it sounds, and it saves a lot of typing. The rest is in the Nastia AI review.

Joi AI is the fastest route to a finished character if you do not want to build one yourself, because the library can be filtered by origin, gender and age bracket and every card brings an opening scenario. If you do build, each character beyond the first costs 1,000 neurons according to independent tests, and the terms say the character belongs to the platform. Candy AI, finally, is the fastest builder of all, a dozen taps to the first sentence, but with no free plan and no memory you can inspect; it is an image platform that can chat.

Common mistakes when you create your own AI girlfriend or character

These are the mistakes I have made myself, in the order in which they hurt.

1. Writing the character around you. “She admires you and is always there for you” produces a friendly assistant. A character needs a self before she can have an opinion about you.
2. Leaving the text field empty because the sliders seemed enough. The character sliders at Nastia AI and the presets at Candy AI are good, and both sit on top of a text description. Empty text means default personality.
3. Rebuilding the looks after the fact. Nomi AI hangs every later image on the anchor you chose while creating; move it in week two and suddenly someone else is sitting in your scenes. Decide the looks before the first selfie.
4. Correcting drift in the chat instead of in the fields. “That is not who you are” in a message lasts an hour. Changing the backstory, the note or the lorebook entry lasts for good.
5. Opening dramatically. See above: whatever emerges as the format in the first replies you carry through the whole conversation. Check it with something banal first, then play.
6. Writing facts into the personality field. “We met on a ferry in September” is a memory, not a trait. In the wrong field it gets treated as tone.
7. Buying the annual plan on day one. All five apps state that payments are not refunded unless the law requires it. First a free month, then a paid month, then the term.
8. Expecting the memory to hold on the free plan. At SpicyChat the window is the same size free and on the first paid tier, at Nomi AI free messages are capped at 400 characters, at Nastia AI old lines slide out. If the character forgets on day three, it may be the plan and not your text.

What it costs to create your own AI girlfriend each month

The honest answer: nothing for one month, then between $5.95 and $19.95, depending on what you want from the character. All amounts in US dollars, exactly as the payment pages bill them, checked on October 1, 2026.

If you only want text and long scenes, SpicyChat at $19.95 a month is the cleanest calculation, because that is where the memory sits and no tokens come off per message. If you want a character who knows you over months, Nomi AI costs $15.99 a month or $99.99 a year, and there is nothing in between. If you want voice and images it gets murky: at Nastia AI you pay $15.99 a month (about $8.33 on the annual plan), and selfies, video and voice messages still come off a token balance. At Joi AI, Premium costs $13.99 a month or $47.99 a year according to a dated check from a logged-in account, but the terms charge 4 neurons for a romantic message and up to 120 for a photo view. At Candy AI, $13.99 is the floor, because 100 tokens a month are included and images come off them.

My advice after three years: build the character on the free plan, play text only for a week, and only then pay, and pay monthly. If the character survives a week, she will survive a month too. If she does not, you have lost nothing but twenty minutes of typing, and you now know which field it belongs in next time. The full ranking with grades is in the best AI character apps.