Genshin Impact developer miHoYo quietly launches BSide: Olivia Lin, an AI desktop waifu

miHoYo, the studio behind Genshin Impact, has quietly rolled out BSide: Olivia Lin in early access in China. It’s an AI desktop companion that’s meant to stay with you through the day.

There’s also a sizable part of miHoYo focused on AI apps and tools. That side of the company gets far less attention than its game business, which makes sense given how huge its games are, but it’s clearly not some side experiment. It looks like a real priority, and that tracks with how personally invested miHoYo CEO Cai Haoyu is in AI.

A very specific kind of AI

BSide: Olivia Lin lets you talk to Olivia Lin, a college student in Shanghai who studies piano and psychology. Her official character description paints a very specific picture: she loves vinyl records and classic movies, likes rainy days, keeps her Letterboxd list updated, works on refining her record collection, and spends part of her free time on a personal project about “music and memories.” Her official character description paints a very specific picture: she loves vinyl records and classic movies, likes rainy days, keeps her Letterboxd list updated, works on refining her record collection, and spends part of her free time on a personal project about “music and memories.” Olivia Lin, of course, isn’t real. She’s an AI character built for people to interact with.

She’s basically a more realistic, more conventionally attractive take on the Lofi Girl type. She answers your prompts as if she’s genuinely interested, listens to whatever you want to tell her, and supplies the background music for your day.

The whole setup is built to make Olivia Lin feel like a real person. You can upload your own music for her to play, and you can send her letters that she replies to with letters of her own, all of it pushing toward the same goal: a parasocial bond strong enough to keep the illusion in place. Even then, she’s still just a collection of routines generating replies to whatever you say at that moment.

BSide: Olivia Lin is out in early access in China, and there’s still no word on a release for the rest of the world.

miHoYo has said it plans to make BSide: Olivia Lin completely free when it officially launches.Given the company’s history, that strongly points to some form of microtransaction being attached to the experience. That makes the whole premise feel even worse, considering how heavily it leans on parasocial attachment. And with AI, there always seems to be one more problem sitting right underneath the first one.

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