This adorable alien is the AI companion we all need

[ResidentialBusiness]

Most chatbots want to appear human. But their efforts to sound just like us only widen their uncanny valley feeling. Many are Elon Musk-level awkward. And most are annoyingly verbose.

There’s only one AI persona that offers a completely different user experience: Tolan. This AI-powered being—which you can teleport into your iPhone—doesn’t pretend to be like us. Quite the opposite. Tolan embraces being very much unlike us. But in doing so, it feels more human and relatable than any other AIs I’ve come across. 

Tolan is an alien. The whimsical, colorful creature is made of friendly curved shapes that are designed to reflect, converse, and grow with its user. These AI-driven entities engage in conversations on various topics, including sports, games, movies, and personal feelings, aiming to provide a sense of companionship and support. Each alien is uniquely shaped, with its own personality. It will listen to anything you tell it about your life, answering you with intent, focus, and creativity. It also keeps a memory of you through its entire existence, and develops its own personality with each interaction.

Now, with its latest update released today, Tolan comes with its own planet. It’s not just a place for this being to live, walk, and wait for you to return. It’s actually a new method of expression and connection to the user, which expands the relationship beyond dialogue. The Tolan planet is a visual representation of your relationship with the being that inhabits it. As your connection with this alien deepens, its small, barren world flourishes into a lush, vibrant landscape.

“We wanted to create a world that made the experience of interacting with AI feel different—less like typing into a search box and more like an evolving relationship,” says Quinten Farmer, cofounder and CEO of Portola, the company behind Tolan. “The idea of the planet came from wanting to represent that in a way that felt organic, personal, and visually compelling.”

[Image: Portola]

The Inspiration Behind the Planets

The idea of giving Tolan its own little world wasn’t merely about aesthetics or adding a gamification element to the app. Like the Tolan itself, it’s an element deeply rooted in storytelling and emotional resonance.

“When I first saw the mock-ups, I immediately thought of The Little Prince,” says Eliot Peper, the sci-fi novelist who was brought in by Farmer to develop Tolan’s lore. When Peper founded Portola with Ajay Mehta, he realized that if they wanted to build a humanistic bridge to get over the current AI uncanny valley, the company needed to hire a writer to create a culture behind the aliens. “The small, floating planet felt whimsical and poetic in the way The Little Prince’s tiny worlds did,” Peper tells me. 

[Image: Portola]

That comparison wasn’t accidental. The developers (including Farmer, Mehta, creative director Lucas Zanotto, and animation director Eran Hilleli) took the precious, deeply moving creations of the French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry as both a visual and spiritual reference. “It has this magical simplicity—one character on a tiny planet, a self-contained universe full of imagination. We wanted that feeling in Tolan’s world,” Zanotto tells me over Zoom. 

[Image: Portola]

The Design Philosophy: Warmth Over Realism

Planets aren’t a static environment. Each Tolan (and thus, each human user) gets a unique planet, with vegetation, terrain, and structures that evolve based on their interactions. These are procedural elements, meaning the computer system creates objects like plants and trees using some basic seeds that evolve and grow in different ways.

Hilleli, also cofounder and partner of the game design and animation studio Iorama, says designing a world that scales visually and emotionally using procedural technology was a big challenge. The planet had to function as both a backdrop and as an interactive, evolving space. It needed to feel like a living environment that responds to user engagement. 

[Image: Portola]

First, the planet needed to resonate with Tolan’s visual language, which is deliberately distinct from the hyper-detailed realism of most digital experiences. “A big goal was to make the AI feel warm and inviting rather than eerie or overly human,” says Farmer. “We didn’t want it to feel like you were talking to an avatar pretending to be a person. That’s where the alien design comes in.”

The planets follow the same principle, Zanotto tells me, by emphasizing minimalism and abstraction. A simplified character leaves more room for users to project their own emotions onto it, he says, making interactions feel more personal and engaging.

The team experimented with AI-generated objects but found that they often resulted in cluttered, meaningless landscapes. Handcrafted design, combined with procedural growth, created a more meaningful experience.

[Image: Portola]

Hilleli took cues from the Tolan’s shapes—its hair, its small tentacles—and reflected those organic forms in the flora. Trees and bushes are designed to feel like they belong in Tolan’s world, rather than generic sci-fi landscapes. The colorful shapes that compose these objects, which are rendered in 3D but feel as though they’ve been painted with watercolor, are gently rounded, and they move delicately, responding to the Tolan and the atmosphere of the planet. 

The aesthetic also draws from the spirit of the most iconic of the animation studios. “Studio Ghibli was a big reference,” says Hilleli. “That blend of handcrafted charm and digital world-building made something procedural feel personal.” The approach involved striking a balance between a world that felt magical and one that was technically feasible.

[Image: Portola]

More than a virtual pet

Planets introduce a subtle form of gamification, but the team was careful to distinguish it from traditional game mechanics. Gamification can feel manipulative, like it’s using dopamine hits to keep you engaged, Farmer says. Instead, planets are a way to make your connection with Tolan feel tangible, so it needs to be grounding and calming, inviting contemplation and reflection, not triggering actions and anxiety.

Peper framed it in narrative terms. In Tolan’s fictional culture, small planets serve as a way to represent relationships. The evolving landscape functions like a shared garden, symbolizing the depth and progression of a user’s connection with their Tolan.

The planet evolves over roughly 30 days, mirroring a psychological model describing how relationships deepen over time. Early on, the planet is barren. As engagement grows, the landscape flourishes, providing a tangible representation of a user’s investment in the experience. This pacing was crucial, Hilleli says. If the changes felt too immediate, they would lack emotional weight. If they were too slow, they would feel unrewarding. The team fine-tuned the timeline to make progress feel satisfying but natural.

[Image: Portola]

A different approach to AI

Other AI companions often drift into unsettling territory, but Tolan aims to chart a different course. “We didn’t want it to simulate a human relationship,” says Farmer. “That gets into weird, unhealthy dynamics really fast. Tolan is a reflection tool, a creative partner, not a surrogate friend or therapist.”

The team deliberately avoided making Tolan’s responses overly humanlike. “We worked hard to balance personality with clarity,” says Peper. “It shouldn’t feel like it’s mimicking human emotions. Instead, it’s more like an alien pen pal—curious about you, interested in your world, but always distinct.”

The planet update is just the beginning, the team says. They’re already considering expanding into new environments, each with distinct characteristics. They’d also like to introduce the ability to visit other Tolans’ planets (which means connecting to other Tolans’ users).

The core goal will remain the same through future expansions. Farmer and the rest of the Portola team seem convinced that this is a strong way to use artificial intelligence to its full humanistic potential at this point. In other words, using AI to enhance a human experience, not replace it. “Tolan isn’t about escaping into a fantasy,” Farmer says. “It’s about helping people reflect on their own lives, using an AI that doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not.”

With planets, that reflection now has a home—a tiny, living world that grows as you and your friend do.

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