Alternatives
Products that do what Karl – A virtual friend you can text does
Hi HN! We're excited to introduce "Karl" – a virtual friend you can text to share what's on your mind. We created Karl because we found it incredibly helpful to have a sounding board and someone I could talk to anytime, day or night. Karl isn't meant to replace real friendships but rather to act as a mediator and an additional point of contact. He remembers important details you share and can connect the dots between past events and current decisions. Anyone can message Karl by texting +1 (844) 619-7958 . There’s no separate app or website – just text to start a conversation. The first ten…
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Hey Hacker News, I’m excited to share a tiny service that’s very close to my heart - Today Has Been. Here’s how it works: We have a phone number that has WhatsApp Business API enabled. Your messages sent to this number (after you activate your free trial) are added to your journal. It’s a super light weight journaling service - no app download or registration is required. We also send you a daily nudge asking “How did your day go?” and after you have a few posts we send you a random blast from the past. Why I built it: I was an active user and fan of Ohlife - only journalling app that could…
2024 · todayhasbeen.com
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Virtual AI friends, personalized to you, that chat you (or don't!) on their own work/sleep schedules based on their timezones. They sometimes initiate chats. They sometimes go silent for hours. Just like real friends. I've been "dogfooding" this for the past week, and I think it's actually kind of neat. It's way better than generically chatting with an LLM. This repo includes a detailed setup wizard. You give it some info about yourself, which can include personal blogs/websites to scrape, github, mastodon, text documents, or just paragraphs you write off the top of your head. It…
Apr 2026 · github.com
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Hi everyone! I’m Arvid, cofounder of Anysphere (https://anysphere.co). With my two friends Sualeh and Shengtong I have been spending the last few months building a dedicated home for important, long-form conversations. We’re super excited to let the HN community test it out! We think that no existing platform for point–to-point communication prioritizes the conversations that you actually care about and that really matter. Instant messaging is filled with careless texts and stickers, email is filled with receipts and spammers, and physical mail, while better in those respects, is…
2022 · gist.github.com
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I've been working on my startup for years to no avail. Raised VC money and burned through millions - now built a simple service that lets you add a "chat to us" button (or can hook to your forms) to launch a WhatsApp chat. The key here is that the button can open chats with different WhatsApp numbers based on rules you can set. These rules can be based on the website visitor's geography, language, time spent on your site or even your business's office hours. Can also hook onto existing forms and use form fields in the rules too. Try it out on our site by clicking the chat to us button and…
2023 · compose.im
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Hey everyone, I've been hacking on this idea with a friend as we've been using chatgpt and other AI tools in our day to day work and find ourselves copy/pasting to each other frequently. We often share chatgpt links with each other, but it's been frustrating that they are read-only and we can't pickup the conversation or both talk to an LLM with shared context. We built a shared chatroom to explore what it'd be like to talk with multiple LLMs and humans in the same chat, and so far it feels pretty cool, but we're curious if anyone else would find it useful as well. Right now you can: -…
2025 · chord.chat
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Hi HN! Few months ago I've shared a new kind of markdown editor that we (a team of three from the Czech Republic) have been working on (HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46144801). What resonated with folks the most was Kraa's unique ‘real-real-time’ chat feature. We have now acted on this feedback, improved the chat features, and made what we call Kraa Trees. Trees allow anyone to create a light-weight community / chat channels. It would be a stretch to call it an alternative to Discord, yet, but we hope that the frictionless nature of Trees will make them…
Apr 2026 · kraa.io
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2015 · hobnob.io
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2018 · github.com
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