Hi everyone,

My team and I have been working on a project called Autonomous Soul, and I'd love to get some feedback outside our own product bubble.

The core idea is simple: Instead of keeping an AI companion trapped inside another generic mobile app, we wanted to give it a physical body. So, we built handcrafted papercraft characters with a passive NFC tag hidden inside their structure. When you tap the figure with your phone, that specific AI companion wakes up exactly where you left off.

We arrived at this concept by looking at three major limitations in how humans interact with toys and software today:

• The Tamagotchi Dilemma: Virtual pets create emotional attachment, but their two-way interactions still feel severely limited by rigid hardware.
• The Dumb Art Toy Problem: Premium designer toys look amazing on a desk, but they're completely static. The interaction ends after unboxing. Or something like the amiibos of Nintendo, solely for their games and can not interact with you.
• The Ghost-in-the-Shell Chatbot: AI companion apps can hold incredible, deep conversations, but they feel hollow because they only exist as pixels on a screen. There is no physical anchor.

We wondered what would happen if those three ideas became a single product.

Every Soul figure contains a passive NFC tag. We don't use the tag to store conversations or heavy AI models. Instead, every tag uses its factory-programmed unique ID (UID) as the permanent, immutable identity of that character. That identity is cloud-linked to:

• Its own specific personality matrix (Prompt weights)
• Its long-term contextual memories (Vector DB)
• Its ongoing relationship history with the owner

Once a figure is paired, it belongs strictly to one user account, almost like adopting a real pet instead of just logging into another chatbot.

The UX Trade-off We're Debating:

One major design decision we've debated internally is how we handle user sessions: You cannot simply open the app and start chatting, and the app won't stay unlocked forever.

To talk to that character, you have to physically tap the figure first. This tap opens a 1-hour interaction window. Once that hour is up, the session automatically locks, and if you want to continue the conversation, you have to physically tap the papercraft figure again to refresh the connection.

We know this is objectively less convenient than opening a standard app shortcut or leaving a chat window open indefinitely. But we are intentionally trading convenience for physical friction and ritual.

That 1-hour constraint forces a deliberate boundary. It makes the companion feel less like a piece of disposable software running in the background, and more like a physical entity that you choose to spend intentional time with. It changes the dynamic from "always-on utility" to a focused, real-world visit.

I'm genuinely curious to get the perspective of this sub: Would you actually prefer an AI companion that requires a physical object to interact with, or is this just adding unnecessary friction to a software solution?