Elise Marchetti
Editor-in-Chief, AI Companion Testing
Lisbon, Portugal · she/her · Covering this beat since 2022
Has been testing AI companion apps in long, unglamorous stretches since 2022, and sets the scoring rubric every review on this site runs through.
2022
Testing since
40+
Apps scored
600+
Hours logged
About
Elise Marchetti runs the editorial side of My Intimate AI. She started testing companion chatbots in 2022, back when the category was mostly two apps and a subreddit, and she has kept the same habit since: set up a character, talk to it every day for three weeks, and write down the exact message where it stopped feeling like a person. The first night is easy to fake. The twentieth is not.
Her background is in consumer software reviewing, which is where the rubric came from. Every app that gets covered here is scored on seven axes — opening quality, memory retention, persona drift, refusal behaviour, pacing under a slow-burn prompt, tone control, and what happens when you contradict it. The same five scripted scenarios go into every app, so two reviews written eight months apart are still comparable.
She is also the person who decides when an app does not get covered at all. If a service cannot state who processes its messages, or its cancellation flow is a support ticket instead of a button, that goes in the review body rather than getting quietly dropped. She has logged more than 600 hours of companion chat across 40-plus services, and she still keeps the transcripts.
Areas of focus
- Conversation quality and persona consistency
- Long-term memory testing across multi-week sessions
- Romance pacing and slow-burn roleplay
- Review methodology and scoring rubrics
- Character creation systems
Background
- Testing AI companions since 2022
- 600+ logged hours of companion chat
- 40+ services scored on the same seven-axis rubric
- Sets the editorial standard for every review on this site
Articles by Elise Marchetti
Start here
AI Girlfriend Site Guide: What a Browser Does Better Than an App
Why the uncensored products live on the web, the ten-minute evaluation test, what a free tier really covers, and the red flags worth closing the tab over.
Characters
Talk to Character AI in 2026: How It Works and What Changed
What each character field controls, why memory slips, the July 2026 lorebooks, the filter’s honest status, and a dated timeline of every 2024–2026 change.
Apps & devices
Virtual Girlfriend App: What Actually Installs on Your Phone
The store guidelines that govern these apps, what a compliant build quietly removes, PWA install on iOS and Android, lock-screen previews, and the billing descriptor.
Characters
Hot Girl Chat: How AI Characters Actually Look, Move and Talk
Roster size versus roster quality, preset grids against slider builders, why diffusion re-rolls a face, and the four ways consistency is actually fixed.
Fact-checked by Elise Marchetti
Elsewhere on the site
The whole cluster hangs off how to judge an AI companion site, which is the piece this team points people at first. The companion chat this team runs is the site the blog belongs to.