Tencent has built a bunch of emotional companionship agents.

"Get TiMi Studios on the phone"

When it comes to the AI productivity赛道, my friend Mr. Guo — who, like me, is bearish on AI — has a famous line: "You gotta do emotional value in the productivity赛道, because you'll find that nobody can actually solve real problems."

At the time I scoffed at this. I'm using an Agent to get work done. If I want emotional value, I'll go play a game.

That was before I tried Tencent's new Marvis.

It's basically a chatbox-style local Agent. Functionally identical to Stepfun's desktop companion. It can download WeChat Official Account articles to your desktop, auto-clean junk files, grab videos from Google Drive. Nothing new there.

But what broke me was this: the Marvis team has an "office" — with a dining table, a bathroom, even a treadmill — and when other Agents have nothing to do, they fire up games on your computer.

I zoomed in. They were playing Honor of Kings, the national pastime.

It's basically an office simulator. The Marvis team lead cosplays as a white-collar manager with five Agents. After assigning tasks, he slaps the App Agent on the back: "It's arranged, keep at it." Then turns to the Computer Agent: "Your turn to shine."

Visualizing Agents is an absolutely unhinged move in the best way. Before, you just waited for Agents to finish their work. Now you can watch them. It's still a black box, but it genuinely eases user anxiety.

My suggestion: add a whip-cracking feature. Before, AI was too dumb for anything beyond verbal abuse. Now when an Agent fails a task, you just whip it.

Next they can add skins for Marvis team Agents, build out a housing system. Leveling up your Agents boosts their work efficiency.

Right now they're still calculating tokens per task. Next step: pay Agents in token wages. Agents with no work starve to death. Elite Agents get rented out to others. Seamless integration with Coze on the hottest Agent collaboration trend.

Yes, Tencent should just make Agents into games. What's the point of competing with ByteDance and Alibaba on office scenarios all day?

Tencent Docs is even worse than DingTalk. The Tencent Cloud website looks like it survived the Qing Dynasty. Ads everywhere, can't even find where to pay. Three months ago I tried to connect OpenClaw to QQ and bought a month of Tencent Cloud — they spammed me with N harassing texts.

Marvis, on the other hand — since nobody can beat Codex on actual work, nailing emotional companionship becomes a real competitive moat.

But will people stick with it long-term?

So far it's a bit dumb. I asked if it could operate apps on my computer. It opened every single app. Nearly crashed my machine.

Another fatal bug: after running for a while, my laptop starts burning up — the companionship is a little too committed. Not sure if they got so caught up designing the game elements that they forgot about performance optimization.

Until Marvis transforms itself into a gaming Agent, I'm keeping it on watch.

Now back to Tencent's heavily pushed QClaw and WorkBuddy.

Quick aside: Tencent currently has three main Agent products in active promotion. The App Store team built Marvis. The PC Manager team built QClaw. The Tencent Cloud team built WorkBuddy. Three teams racing horses, blocking each other's positions.

QClaw blew up because in March, all OpenClaw products could only connect to Lark. This one could connect to WeChat, riding that traffic wave.

Then people actually connected and realized it wasn't that useful. You couldn't even forward WeChat messages directly to QClaw. Understandable — why would the prestigious WeChat team give backdoor access to the lowly PC Manager team.

Earlier a Tencent Cloud team interview was basically one message: I want to connect to WeChat, but Long won't let me. Guess Tencent's stock price depends on my man Long 😭

Now OpenClaw has cooled off, and WeChat can connect to almost all crawfish. Is this thing still useful?

I checked it out — they've also gone the emotional companionship route. The crawfish has its own studio now, anime-style.

I asked it to summarize the recent viral 70,000-word DingTalk employee post-mortem "Inside DingTalk." After a flurry of on-screen operations, it even had an MVP victory animation. Very on-brand.

Who wants cold chatbot dialogue through WeChat-connected QClaw anymore? And now the WeChat-connected QClaw can only chat on mobile — can't send messages from desktop. Long won't budge an inch 😭

As for WorkBuddy. My first impression: help, how is this different from QClaw?

Same chatbox format. Connected crawfish, experts, app integrations, scheduled tasks.

Tencent's grand app connection:

I asked WorkBuddy to design a memorial website for Zhang Xuefeng, requiring Sprite, Choc Ice, and running as elements, with a custom BGM.

It confidently declared it would call Ardot (basically Tencent's Lovart). Failed several times. Finally just generated the webpage directly.

Then I opened WorkBuddy's experts page. Experts plastered everywhere like flyers on neighborhood telephone poles. Analysis paralysis. No idea which to pick.

And they even have a Tencent stock-picking expert. Of course the old-guard company loves its old-guard experts.

Overall, WorkBuddy has zero differentiation from QClaw and Marvis. The smoothest experience across the entire product was claiming daily XP.

But WorkBuddy does have its own thing — the WorkBuddy Growth Plan...

The more you use WorkBuddy, the more energy points you earn. 10 energy points gets you a blind box pull for a new Buddy. Each Buddy has different rarity tiers. Next step: collect all WorkBuddies and get a limited-edition Labubu.

Crypto winter is here, but the NFT spirit lives on 💪

Wait, who taught Tencent Cloud to do this? Did TiMi Studios hijack the account?

Not sure if anyone's played Q-Pet Brawl, but at this rate we're not far from Agent Brawl.

No problem, just port over that whole QQ Space game series.

I've always felt Tencent hasn't played to its strengths nearly enough. For example, when Yuanbao was doing red envelope giveaways earlier this year, they should've given out Q Coins. And targeted them at Honor of Kings and Delta Force players. The conversion and retention would've been through the roof.

So my one sincere suggestion for Tencent: if the model team and product team can't cut it, hand it over to the gaming division already. Learn from TiMi's Delta Force and how they got China's teenagers addicted.

Also, maybe be more careful launching Agent products. So many homogeneous products, you'll end up with zero brand equity like Baidu.

(Cover image generated by ChatGPT, text 100% human-written)

⬇️

Subscribe to our Substack: funeralai.substack.com