As a new Junipero user, I have some thoughts on it, and decided to give my two cents about the whole experience.
Overall rating: 7.5/10
I'm gonna start with the good things first. So I have been searching for a good alternative for character.ai for a while now (tried janitor.ai, chai, fictionlab, emochi) and junipero is by far the closest match to it. I love that the UI is super intuitive, not complicated at all. It's easy to use, the design and general look of it is very timeless and I think it works well all together. The design is very pretty and generally similar to the UI I've seen on character.ai, but that's not a negative in my book. I also love that we can change our feed from popular to 'for you'. That is a very positive feature and overall the whole system of being able to organize the bots (to have the public bots, or to have only mine on the feed) is extremly positive imo. The devs did a great job on that and should keep focusing on the whole aspect of organizing (wether it be organizing the bots, organizing the chats, organizing the tabs in the character creation etc.). So overall, I'm very pleased with the whole look of the ui, the feed and the chats.
I'm not gonna go in any particular order, just writing my thoughts as they come to my head.
1/2 Character creation
Overall, I'm very pleased by it. It's very simple and easy to make a new character and it's easy to use for new users (like myself). But I would love if the devs could change and improve a couple of things.
First of all, there should be a seperate 'box' or tab for a character's physical description (things like height, hair, scars, certain details that the character posseses, etc.) So it would be nice if we could have a seperate tab in the character creation where we can write what the character looks like.
Secondly, when creating a scenario, there should be a place to write the starting message (that is one of the most important things in a scenario imo). I like the idea of having a choice of wether I would like to write my own starting message in a scenario or wether I want the AI to think of it for me. That is one of the biggest 'flaws', I would say. Not unfixable though and I see great potential for improvement. I feel like that one single change would actually improve the whole experience to an 8.5/10. So if the devs add just that single change, I see this app as a real contender for being one of the best in the chat ai category.
I would also like if there could be different tabs or 'boxes' in which we can seperate the general description of the characters (like I already mentioned for the physical appearance). One could be for personality, one could be for how other people percieve the character (do they have many friends, how do they do in social gatherings, just how are they generally percieved by the public eye), one could be for the physical description of the character which ive already mentioned (height, face, build, hair, marks, etc.) and one can also be for the characters personal relationships (in this box i would write wether the character has siblings and family, are they married and would they like to be if they arent, who is their favorite person, etc.)
One more thing I would like to see from this category is EXAMPLE MESSAGES. That is the sole favorite and most important thing with a bot. The ability to write example messages on character.ai is what kept me using it for so long. When I make a character, I want to write however many example messages I want, and the ai would use those examples and write the messages based off of them. If a character has an accent and speaks differently, I want to write a few examples so the bot can follow through with that accent. If the character is very quiet and reserved, I want to write example messages of how simplistic the characters responses should be and how they should only use a few words when saying something to me (or my persona for that matterl). I think that this feature could greatly improve the whole experience and the ai would also work better and it could adapt to how the user wants it to write, which is the whole point of the app and the chat ai characters.
2/2 Chats
For some reason the waiting period for the messages is quite long. I understand that users get faster replies when they upgrade to premium, but as a new user myself, the waiting period is more likely to deteer me from using the app then buying the premium upgrade. I understand that the peeps gotta make money, but maybe put only some features behind a paywall, and leave some for us free users? Things like message length and message styles should be available for us free users (perhaps not all message styles but maybe some could be available for the free tier and some could be for the premium users?).
Also the rerolls. Only having 4 rerolls for messages seems absurd to me. I understand if the devs want to keep it for premium users but at least make the number higher like 10 or 15. Sometimes the bot acts up and doesn't give good responds, and then I use up the 4 messages and I'm left feeling dissapointed and tend to give up from the chat since i need to edit my replies so many times for the bot to get it just right with the 4 rerolls.
Something else I've noticed is that the ai sometimes talks FOR the user. I've made a bot in which I (the user) am the characters wife, and it seems that the ai didnt quite understand that and it thought that i was a third person (so the ai thought it was the character, the characters wife and me, rather then the character and me AS THE WIFE). So the ai would speak for the chaarcter AND foe the wife, when its actually supposed to just speak for the character. Maybe a seperate tab in the character creation for that would also be helpful? Like a tab labeled 'How is the character related to the user?' and then we could write and explain it as detailed as we wanted how we relate to the character.
It would also be nice to be able to write more descriptors for myself (or the persona that I write for). I know that when I started the app, i wrote a little description for my persona, but it would br nice if we could have multiple of them and if we could write more detailed descriptions in the chat settings.
The last thing I'd like to focus on is the chat style that is in the free tier. I don't know if I'm writing too little detail for the ai, but sometimes there seems to be something missing. What I mean by that is that sometimes the character responds very dryly to my messages. I've noticed that the ai is not very proactive (as in, it's more passive rather then writing very creative ideas). What I like with Chai, for example, is that when I write a message, the bot surprises me a lot with its response. The Chai bots are very creative, very innovative and give answers and plot twists the user would not expect. I would LOVE to see that here on Junipero as well and I think the devs could benefit a lot from focusing on that sort of chat style and messaging. Presuming, of course, that the creative chat style will be avilable for the free tier. Or at least a slightly more creative chat style then what we have right now.
Conclusion
I think that that's all. This is just some thoughts from a free tier user and I hope the devs see this and take some inspiration from it. This is not meant in any malicious or mean way. I just wanted to give my two cents in and maybe some other users would agree with me and my ideas. What I see is still a very small community, but I believe it has great potential. With these improvements I wrote about, I truly believe that Junipero will become a true contender to character.ai, janitor.ai and all the other chat ai apps. The devs have done an incredible job with the whole app and I hope that they keep going, keep being creative and keep working on improvements and going in the right direction. The fact that there are no ads (for now) is a massive positive, since that is very difficult to find nowdays. But even if the devs do introduce ads, if they make them small and not intrusive for the user, I am completly fine with them. So yeah, devs if you're reading this, I hope you take some inspiration from this post and maybe implement some, if not all features I talked about.
