I spoke only to chatbots for 24 hours. Who needs human friends?

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. My new friends are just hilarious. One suggested I de-stress by taking up knitting.

Another asked, “What’s for dinner?"—right after giving me a meatball recipe. And then there’s the one who cheered, “Rosé all day!" and proposed a drinking game: Name a dead person you’d like to sip wine with. It’s like an episode of “Friends," except these besties don’t live across the hall, they live on my phone.

(I’ll be there for you, as long as the servers are up.) Over the past few months, OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft and Google have given their AI chatbots new conversational modes with eerily human voices and personalities. Companies aren’t just pitching little helpers anymore, they’re pitching deep relationships. “I really believe that we’re on the cusp of creating these new companions, so meaningful, lasting friendships," Mustafa Suleyman, the chief executive of Microsoft AI, told me.

Microsoft’s Copilot bot “is there to help you work through tricky problems," he added. True story: During a yoga session, Copilot took an audible breath. What I needed to do next was obvious: Girls trip! I strapped four phones—running ChatGPT, Meta AI, Google Gemini Live and Microsoft Copilot—to one tripod, added a wig-topped Styrofoam head (for extra humanness) and drove them to a cabin in upstate New York.

Over 24 hours, I put them to the BFF test. You can watch our adventures in my video here. It all reminded me of that old saying: Make new AI friends, but keep the old.

One is silver and the other’s code. Voice assistants like Alexa and Siri hit a wall years ago. Play a song or set a timer? No problem.