Talkie and Xingye

What it is

Talkie is an AI companion app built by MiniMax and released for international markets in June 2023.^[1] Apps of this kind are organised around conversation: a user talks with AI-driven characters rather than issuing single commands, and comes back to the same characters over time. Talkie is the version MiniMax ships outside mainland China, which separates it from the company's domestic products.

The apps that came before

Talkie was not MiniMax's first consumer app. Glow, launched in China in October 2022, came first; by February 2023 it had reached nearly 5 million users, and in March 2023 it was removed from Chinese app stores.^[1] Talkie followed in June 2023, and a Chinese counterpart, Xingye (星野), arrived in September 2023.^[1] The pair gives MiniMax two versions of the same idea in two markets: Talkie abroad, Xingye at home.

Growth

The public numbers on Talkie come from press reporting rather than from company disclosures. The Wall Street Journal reported about 11 million monthly active users by July 2024.^[1] Monthly active users is a standard measure of how many distinct people open an app within a month, which makes it a better indicator of reach than a download count. The Star, citing Data.ai, reported in June 2024 that Talkie had ranked among the top six entertainment apps on Apple's App Store since 20 May of that year.^[2] The Star also reported a monthly growth rate of more than 150% for Talkie, against 21.6% for Character.ai.^[2]

Where it sits

Talkie and Xingye are MiniMax's companion-app pair: one product concept, launched under two names in two markets, with the overseas version followed most closely in the press. The comparison with Character.ai in that coverage places Talkie in the same segment as an established AI character app, and the App Store ranking is the kind of third-party signal analysts use when a young app does not publish its own figures. For a reader trying to place Talkie, the useful facts are the dates (Glow in October 2022, Talkie in June 2023, Xingye in September 2023), the audience it is aimed at, and the scale reported for it a year after launch.^[1]