Why Do We Turn to Virtual Companions? A Text Mining Analysis of Replika Reviews

Many people globally experience the feeling of loneliness and struggle with its consequences. A modern way to deal with this loneliness and lack of companionship is to use empathetic and emotional conversational agents. Often referred to as virtual companions, these agents can engage in human-like conversations with their users and build relationships with them through modern artificial intelligence technologies. One established service of such virtual companions is Replika, which we investigate in this study to explore what users expect to gain from long-term interactions with virtual companions and what they tend to talk about with them. Using a text mining approach and 119,831 reviews of the Replika service, we analyze users' sentiments, emotions, and topics. Our results show that users interact with virtual companions to cope with their loneliness and, especially, to address their mental well-being. Furthermore, Replika users have a joyful and beneficial experience during long-term interaction with such virtual companions.