When AI tools can answer questions, suggest replies, and offer support at any time, social platforms face a sharper question: what do people still need from them?
The answer is not simply more contacts. Getting in touch with others has become relatively easy. What remains difficult is finding someone who can genuinely understand what they mean and how they feel at that moment.
Soul App, a Chinese AI social platform, has been exploring this through its product design and AI development. Its approach points to a broader change in social networking: moving from profile matching to supporting relationships that may lead to real understanding.
Much of the AI used in social products so far has focused on improving feed ranking, recommending accounts, matching shared interests, and making discovery faster. These tools improve efficiency, but they usually stop at introducing users to each other.
Soul App’s direction goes one step further. Instead of only asking whether two users share a label or interest, the platform tries to understand whether their ways of expressing, responding, and interacting may fit each other.
This idea is visible in Soul’s onboarding experience. Instead of asking users to start by uploading a profile photo, Soul first guides them through Soul Test, which helps form an initial profile based on personality, preferences, and expression style. Users are then connected through the platform’s Planets feature, where social interaction starts less from how someone looks and more from how they think, speak, and express themselves. Spaces such as Soul Square and Audio partyrooms also help users continue interacting beyond a single private chat.
The platform’s AI capability then helps make this interaction-based understanding more precise. Soul X, Soul App’s self-developed model, is designed to understand text, voice, images, and video in a more unified way, helping the platform capture social signals that are often too subtle for simple tags. A small example is the difference between “haha” and “hahahaha.” In a conversation, the first may be a polite response, while the second may suggest that someone is genuinely amused.
This makes the platform less focused on surface-level comparison and more focused on interaction quality. User behavior on Soul also suggests that this approach is not only a product concept. Publicly disclosed figures during the first eight months of 2025, the daily average time spent by users on Soul exceeded 50 minutes, while the platform’s average monthly three-month user retention rate reached 80%. The proportion of average MAUs participating in interactions reached 86%. Among users who used private messaging, each user exchanged approximately 75 one-on-one private messages per day on average. These figures suggest that users are returning to spaces where conversation and relationships can continue.
Soul’s 2025 Gen Z AI Engagement Report further supports this direction. More than 80% of surveyed young people said they had built real relationships with the help of AI. Among them, 43.6% said AI helped generate more suitable and interesting replies, while 39.9% said AI provided topic suggestions and emotional support that helped conversations continue. AI is not replacing social interaction. Its more useful role is to make real interaction easier to begin and more likely to continue, especially in the moments where users struggle to start a chat or keep a conversation going.
When people already have many ways to connect, the next question is no longer who can recommend more profiles. The key is which platforms can help users find conversations that feel natural enough to continue. In the AI era, the true value of social networking shifts from the efficiency of matching to the depth of resonance.
