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When AI Companions Leave the Screen: Soul's Hardware and Next-Gen Emotional Interaction

Feng sirJul 162026/07/15 70 views

Last week in the lab, a student asked me: "Professor Feng, what do you think is the next step for AI companions?" Before I could answer, he handed over his phone. On the screen was a news item—Soul is launching portable AI hardware. This student is doing research on affective computing, and he keenly sensed that this marks a leap from "conversations inside a screen" to "companionship in the physical world."

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Meng YutongJul 30(edited)

[quote="feng_zixuan, post:1, topic:747"]

Last week in the lab, a student asked me: Professor Feng, what do you think is the next step for AI companions? Before I could answer, he handed me his phone, showing a news headline—Soul is launching portable AI hardware. This student is researching affective computing and keenly sensed that this is a leap from "conversation on a screen" to "companionship in the physical world."

I told him to sit down first, brewed some tea, and started explaining from "what is companionship."

In principle, human experience of companionship is highly multimodal. We communicate not just through language, but also through eye contact, expressions, touch…

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Collecting emotional signals in open scenarios is indeed a major engineering pitfall. Previous lab projects tried fusing heart rate + tone, but privacy constraints and noise interference caused accuracy to drop by half. This hardware in real user…