Character.AI
Companion and roleplay chat at consumer scale.
Full Character.AI record →Head to head
Character.AI vs ERNIE Bot
Character.AI (Character.AI) and ERNIE Bot (Baidu) both sit in Writing. ERNIE Bot is the cheaper entry point at Pay-as-you-go API pricing with select free trial skills/components. Ernie 5.0 at 0.006-0.01 RMB per 1k input tokens.. ERNIE Bot shipped more tracked changes in the last 30 days (15 vs 0). Every value below comes from the latest crawl of the vendors' own pages.
| Attribute | Character.AI Character.AI | ERNIE Bot Baidu |
|---|---|---|
| Segment | Writing | Writing |
| Version | 2025 | 5.0 |
| Entry cost | Free tier · from $9.99/mo | Pay-as-you-go API pricing with select free trial skills/components. Ernie 5.0 at 0.006-0.01 RMB per 1k input tokens. |
| Pricing tiers | — | Pay-as-you-go API free |
| Model stack | in-house models | DeepSeek-V3.1 · ERNIE 4.5 (open weights) · ERNIE 4.5 Turbo · ERNIE 4.5 Turbo VL · ERNIE 4.5 VL 28B A3B · ERNIE 5.0 · ERNIE X1.1 Preview · ernie-4.5-turbo-128k · ERNIE-5.0-Thinking-Preview |
| Context window | — | 119k |
| Public API | ||
| Routes models | ||
| Changes / 30d | 0 | 15 |
| Origin | Global | China |
| Capabilities | Character creation, Voice, Feed | Multimodal input, Search integration, Digital humans, Enterprise Qianfan platform, Multi-Agent, RAG, Multimodal, OCR |
ERNIE Bot
Baidu's assistant (Wenxin Yiyan), backed by the ERNIE model line and integrated into Baidu Search.
Full ERNIE Bot record →