Designing Kibu: Characters

Yesterday we announced Kibu, our first collection of Embodied Companions. This is the story of how we brought them to life.

The Brief

Our first brief was to explore how embodiment — in the form of simple, engaging animated characters — could add depth, emotion, and relatability to AI conversation. We wanted interactions that feel warm and personal, not transactional.

We drew inspiration from the rich tradition of character design in games, animation, and pet simulation — from Tamagotchi to Pokémon to Studio Ghibli. The key insight was that users immediately understand characters that feel like peers, not pets.

Nine Personalities

Each Kibu started as a personality archetype, not a visual design. We defined the emotional range first — who they are, how they talk, what they care about — and then built the visual identity to match.

Structured Personality

Each character is defined by a structured personality schema: an array of personality traits, a tone definition, a default mood, and a set of behavioral traits. These fields compose into model-ready prompts at inference time — not a single paragraph someone wrote once and forgot about.

This structure means we can modulate a character's delivery without losing their identity. When a user is sad, Mochi gets softer — but she's still Mochi. Smokey stays dry even when he's being gentle.

Animation with Runway ML

For animation, we use Runway ML to generate character-specific motion sequences — idle loops, listening poses, thinking animations, talking gestures, and emotion-specific reactions. These are exported as Lottie JSON files and played in real-time on the client, switching states based on the conversation flow.

Each character has different animation personality parameters: intensity, speed, and hold times. Pixel bounces faster. Fern moves slower. Smokey barely moves at all — and that's the point.

What's Next

We're bringing these characters to native iOS with Lottie for smooth, 60fps animation on device. Voice interaction is on the roadmap. And we're always refining the emotional language of each character based on user feedback.

Meet all 9 kibus here.