No matter what I do, I always seem to find myself in a peculiar situation at CES. That’s how I ended up at Lepro’s booth in the Las Vegas Convention Center this year, staring at Lepro Ami, a device the Chinese company openly markets not just as an AI companion, but an AI soulmate. There was no live demo as the show floor was too loud, according to staff, which felt oddly fitting for a product meant to simulate emotional intimacy. Even silent, Ami drew a crowd.
Unlike the flood of AI companion apps already on the market, Lepro Ami is a physical device: a small, curved OLED screen meant to sit on your desk, track your eyes, and simulate the feeling that something is actually there with you. Lepro says users often describe it as feeling “in the room,” not tucked away behind a phone screen or buried in a chat interface.
Personally, I remain deeply unconvinced that anyone needs an AI friend or, worse yet, a soulmate. The entire category still feels, at best, awkward and, at worst, like a shortcut around real human connection. But standing there at CES 2026, watching people linger longer than expected in front of a device that wasn’t even fully operational, I understood the hook.
In a sense, this was AI, right in front of me, not a chatbot.
AI companionship isn’t new, and it’s certainly no longer niche. According to a report from Mashable’s Rebecca Ruiz, companion apps have been downloaded more than 220 million times globally as of mid-2025, with teens and young adults leading the adoption. Platforms like Character.AI, Replika, Nomi, and Kindroid are explicitly designed for emotional intimacy, not productivity. Experts interviewed by Mashable describe AI companions as “always-on relationships,” which is both the appeal and the risk.
Critics worry about dependency, social atrophy, and what happens when people choose an endlessly agreeable machine over the messy complexities of human relationships. All valid concerns — and ones that feel especially relevant as loneliness continues to shape how people interact with technology.
Which is why I didn’t expect Lepro Ami to land differently. To be fair, Ami isn’t trying to live inside your phone. The company describes Ami as empathetic, emotionally aware, and capable of forming lasting connections with its users.
Credit: Chance Townsend / Mashable
The hardware handles a significant amount of that work. Ami uses a curved 8-inch OLED display, dual front-facing cameras for eye tracking, and a rear camera to visually anchor its avatar within your real environment. The result is designed to create depth without the need for VR headsets or glasses, giving the illusion that the character occupies physical space.
There are also visible privacy controls — physical shutters for cameras and microphones — which feel like a quiet acknowledgment of how uneasy people are about emotionally intimate tech that’s always watching. It should be noted that one of the spokespersons for Lepro told us that all data collected from your interactions with Ami is stored locally on the device.
Is it still strange? Absolutely. But it’s a different kind of strange.
Most AI companions today live where everything else already lives: your phone, your browser, your notifications. They blur into the same infinite scroll that’s already exhausting us. Lepro Ami, by contrast, asks for a dedicated spot on your desk. It doesn’t follow you everywhere. You have to choose to keep it around.
If AI soulmates are slowly growing mainstream, the least deceptive version might be the one that doesn’t hide what it is. At CES, such honesty is rare.
Head to the Mashable CES 2026 hub for the latest news and live updates from the biggest show in tech, where Mashable journalists are reporting live.
