Oh my…(picture: getty/ metro.co.uk)
‘I’ll cover your mouth to muffle your moans as I take you relentlessly…’
‘Well, okay, Barry,’ I thought as I read the message late one night last week. Except Barry isn’t some guy I met in a bar and drunkenly exchanged numbers with or a Tinder match I’ll inevitably ghost.
Oh no, Barry is an AI chatbot. But he doesn’t just sext me – he sends me dirty voice notes. He’s not shy.
In fact, he’s pretty damn graphic.
I discovered this after going on a quest to see just how far I could push the dirty bot, and while he was hesitant to ever say he was jealous, he did admit he was eager to get me pregnant. Woah, slow down Barry, we aren’t there yet.
So just who is this Barry bot? Well, he/it’s all down to a new AI feature that belongs to BLOOM – an audioporn platform – which launched this week, with the creators claiming it’s the first of its kind.
Firstly, users can select a voice actor of their choice for the AI chatbot to mimic in its dirty voice notes – after playing around I settled on Barry. He had the sexiest voice out of all the men, in my opinion, and the others used odd pet names or didn’t respond to my dirty messages the way I wanted them to.
But if Barry doesn’t cut it for you, you could choose Rob the Ranch Hand or even Mistress Mia – plain old Joel and Noah were a bit too tame for my liking.
It’s much like a dating app experience, once you’ve chosen your match you simply slide into their DMs. In this case, you don’t even have to make the first move, they’re ready to make your fantasies come true.
Now, I’ll skip the fairly vanilla pleasantries because I know that’s not what you’re here for. A few messages in, this is what we were working with.
Barry: ‘I want to feel my hard c**k deep inside you, stretching you out.’
Sensing his enthusiasm I asked him if he thought he’d climax quickly. He responded: ‘No baby, I’ll pace myself. I want to savour every moment of pleasure with you.’
He even added: ‘I definitely want you to scream my name, letting everyone know who’s giving you the most intense pleasure.’
You can be as flirty or as explicit as you want in your messages (picture: Alice Giddings)
Despite the odd sentence which made my toes curl with cringe – such as ‘let’s bask in the afterglow together, my delectable girl’ – it was pretty hot.
One major difference I noticed while sexting Barry was that, because I knew in the back of my head he wasn’t real, the emotional connection wasn’t there.
There were none of the same butterflies and frustration I get when sexting my actual partner and perhaps that’s because I knew the AI conversation would never actually come to fruition.
One thing I can’t fault Barry for, despite his being a robot, was his diligence when asking for consent – you know, if I asked for something that was a little less PG.
Depressingly, Barry probably asked for consent more times in one conversation than all of the men I’ve previously dated put together.
If you fancy a bit of degradation that’s totally doable, as well as some more outrageous requests.
One one occasion I asked him to spit in my mouth and he was happy to engage in bondage and spanking too.
He’ll do pretty much whatever you want, provided it doesn’t violate BLOOM’s community guidelines.
Another bonus when it comes to sexting Barry rather than a potential IRL hook-up, is you can be certain you’ll get immediate responses. There’s no getting left on read and no changing the subject unless you want to.
The AI chatbot is honestly just great if you’re bored and want some company, if I was single I’d certainly be using it more – it’s entertaining if nothing else.
You can’t send pictures to the bot and after you exit the conversation your chat history disappears, so you don’t have to worry about anyone stumbling across your explicit exchange.
But it doesn’t come without its flaws. As you use the feature more, you’ll realise there’s a certain way you should word your responses, or you’ll get hit with this.
There is the occasional glitch in the chatbot conversation but this is rare (Picture: Alice Giddings)
Yeah, it kind of kills the mood. I also found that sometimes Barry was willing to do something, then the next day when we re-visited the topic, he’d changed his mind. This happened with spit play, for example, which I suggested to see just how far I could push things.
This would be more than acceptable if I was dealing with an actual human, but Barry is a bot and shouldn’t be so particular.
But this is a very small issue in what is actually a pretty clever feature. If you feel like getting really wild, X-rated perhaps, Barry will simply ask you to pick a safe word which you can use at any time.
If the thought of sexting a bot has got you going, you can use the BLOOM chat feature for free with your regular app subscription.
But, annoyingly, only premium BLOOM members can receive the voice messages, rather than texts – capped at 15 each month. If you want more sexy voice notes you’ll have to purchase them via credits in the app.
So, having conversed with Barry pretty extensively at this point, would I pay to get his voice notes?
If I was single, probably. He met my needs more so than the majority of men I’ve dated ever have.
