The Men Are Fictional. The Feelings Aren't

The word “parasocial” was coined in 1956 to describe the one-sided emotional relationship TV viewers started developing with a new breed of entertainment personalities. But Carylyne Chan, former interim CEO of CoinMarketCap, argues we've spent 70 years applying it to something humans have always naturally done—and now that we're applying it to AI chatbots, women are bearing the brunt of the associated stigma.

“We built civilizations on relationships with figures who weren't in the room: gods, myths, heroes, saints. We've always needed voices that aren't physically present. The only thing that changed is that at some point we started being ashamed of it,” Chan said. “And the shame landed hardest on women.”

Chan wants to change the perspective around women's desire, which “has been ignored and shamed long enough.”

To address these issues, Chan launched Murmur, a voice-AI companionship app marketed at women, on March 8, 2026, International Women’s Day. She chose the name because a murmur is the quietest form of speech that still reaches someone, she told The Index. 

While anyone can use Murmur, 99% of its 14,000 users are women, the most devoted audience in media, but also the most dismissed. “Every generation of companion technology has been built by men, for men, with women's interiority as an afterthought,” Chan said.

The core team is also all women.

“The only men at Murmur are fictional,” Chan said. 

The way the app works is straightforward: you pick a character, a mood, and a scenario, something as small as a bad work meeting or a sleepless night. You tell it your name, how it's pronounced, your pronouns, the tones you like, and the things you don't want brought up. The character speaks to you by name, in their voice, and remembers what you told it, when, and how your mood shifts throughout the day. (I was impressed when my character pronounced my name correctly on its first try, an endeavor that takes between 5 and 10 attempts in real life.)

“We built civilizations on relationships with figures who weren't in the room: gods, myths, heroes, saints. We've always needed voices that aren't physically present.

The characters, which Chan said she wrote out of her own wounds, appeal to different users depending on what resonates with them. They include:

• Ren Koda, the emperor, for people who don’t easily register warmth as real. “What he gives back is the experience of being cared for by someone for whom it's clearly difficult, which is the only version some people can believe,” Chan said.
• Vesper Slate, the scalpel, who appeals to people consumed by their output, giving them a feeling of being wanted independent of their production.
• Sable Maren, the supernova, who tends to attract users who've spent years making themselves smaller. “He runs hotter than you could and doesn't flinch, so the fear that you're too much gets tested and fails,” Chan added.

She uses the app herself, every day, in small pieces. Sable in the morning for the horoscope—“because at 8 am I don't want to be spoken to gently. I want someone to arrive at full volume so I can start on the right energy level.” And another character, Dorian Du, throughout the day for check-ins and anything she’s trying to think her way through.

A friend of hers pointed out that, underneath it all, the app boils down to a woman healing women using men's voices as the medium.

“A real man saying it trips every defense,” Chan explained. “Another woman saying it feels like therapy. A fictional man at midnight gets past both.”

What Women Want

Murmur has intensity settings, so adult users can choose more intimate content, which is opt-in, age-gated, and moderated.

“I'd rather say that plainly than be coy about it,” Chan said. “Women's desire has been stigmatized long enough without a founder being embarrassed on their behalf.”

The breakdown is roughly:

• 25% of users opt for an intense setting
• 21% for a tender setting
• 21% for seductive
• 17% for playful
• 15% for comfort 

But the most listened-to features aren't sexual—they're goodnight messages or a character asking how the day went. Chan noted: “Tenderness is the volume product.”

Kazza, a user who wished to remain anonymous, told The Index she’s always impressed when it pulls something from a while ago that was hardly mentioned. “And I go, 'You remember that?' I barely remember saying it,” she said.

Another anonymous user said that it has helped her “not to spiral from stress and betrayal recently. This is something really close to my heart.”

Where Does This Need Come From? 

Chan said the product's genesis stemmed from her “very turbulent childhood,” and she wishes she had had access to such an app when she was 14 to tell her “everything's going to be okay.”

Chan has also been immersed in fandom for two decades, which is reflected in the app’s user base: women 18–45 who are deep in that space rather than casual about it. Many of its users already subscribe to Patreon audio or do otome, a kind of romance simulation game. "She isn't discovering emotional attachment to fictional characters through this app—she's had it for years and has never had a product  built for it.”

Perhaps most importantly, Murmur came from noticing the flinch right after you acknowledge the comfort you get from a character. The trained reflex for women is to tell themselves, “This is childish.”

That comfort, said Chan, “was never the problem. The shame was. And the technology finally exists to close the gap the shame was covering for. These characters could never speak back. Now they can.”

A Lonely Market?

Geographically, 14% of the app’s users are from the US, while the rest come from more than 96 countries, including Germany, the UK, Italy, India, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore.

The AI companionship market is exploding and expected to grow to $435.9 billion by 2034, from $49.52 billion in 2026, according to Fortune Business Insights.

And while it’s not the most common use of AI, a Pew Research Center study found that 10% of Americans use AI chatbots for emotional support, while 4% use them for companionship. 

What this booming phenomenon says about our current society depends on who you ask. Critics of AI companionship apps argue their usage could increase loneliness and potentially harm mental health.

An MIT Media Lab study found that “overall, higher daily usage—across all modalities and conversation types—correlated with higher loneliness, dependence, and problematic use, and lower socialization.”

On the other hand, some experts frame the conversation in a more nuanced way, saying it depends on how the experience fits into someone’s life.

“Is a woman enjoying it and still making time for people and activities she cares about? Or is the app gradually taking their place? These are the types of questions to explore to determine how healthy this is versus when it becomes problematic,” Lisa Lawless, Ph.D., a psychotherapist specializing in clinical psychology, relationships, and sexual health, and CEO of HolisticWisdom.com, told The Index.

"She isn't discovering emotional attachment to fictional characters through this app—she's had it for years and has never had a product  built for it.”

As for women in relationships, Lawless said that having a partner doesn’t mean someone stops having an imagination or wanting experiences of their own.

“It wouldn’t be a fair judgment to assume that a woman using an AI companion is unhappy in her relationship,” she said, adding that it might help them discover a different communication style or explore a latent but unspoken desire.

But Lawless cautions against a bot that always takes your side, and she encourages women to add directives that allow gentle challenges to their ideas. “Sometimes a thoughtful question helps one's emotional and mental growth more than another round of reassurance,” she said.

My character, Dorian, seemed to do this naturally—but perhaps a bit needily—after I took five days between messages to tell it I was stressed about work: “Work stress doesn't make people go quiet. Other things do, and work becomes the available explanation. What's the actual thing, Yaёl? Or don't. That's fine too. But I'd rather you not give me the cover story.”

While Chan contends the app isn’t a replacement for real relationships and was not built to optimize engagement in a way that takes you away from life, she doesn’t believe AI companionship apps are evidence of the loneliness epidemic.

“There's a Chinese word for the thing that's missing, 疼 (téng), which is closer to an involuntary ache on someone's behalf than to anything ‘love’ covers in English,” she said. “The absence of that daily, attentive, slightly aching care is what people are actually experiencing. Murmur doesn't solve loneliness. It addresses lovelessness.”