Charisma is a conversational AI platform founded in 2016 by Guy Gadney and John Whitney under the company To Play For Ltd, based in Oxford, UK. The platform builds interactive virtual characters with memory, emotion, and branching dialogue for use in video games, training simulations, marketing experiences, and interactive film.
Rather than a general chatbot framework, Charisma runs on proprietary large language models tuned for narrative dialogue, giving characters persistent memory across a conversation and emotional responses that shift the story's direction based on what a user says. The company has partnered with organizations including Comcast NBCUniversal's LIFT Labs and Keywords Studios, and its tools support AI voice generation and lip-sync integration for 3D character deployment.
Charisma serves game studios, corporate training teams, and marketing agencies building interactive character experiences rather than standard customer-support bots. Pricing runs pay-as-you-go for developers at $5 per 50,000 credits, about 200 minutes of interaction, for small SDK-based projects, with custom Enterprise pricing covering front-end development, script-writing, and support for larger organization-scale deployments.
