Meet Yui: the black cat who greets every visitor to Kanji Pay
Most companies buy AI to save time in the back office. Kanji Pay put it at the front door.
Kanji Pay (幹事Pay), run by Canvi Inc. in Japan, is a service for collecting event fees and membership dues. An organizer creates an event, shares a link or a QR code, and attendees pay without creating an account. On the day, staff check people in by scanning the same QR code, and every attendee gets a receipt in their own name. The tagline on the site says it in one line: 事前決済 × 当日QR受付, pay in advance, check in with QR.
Since autumn, the first thing a visitor meets on kanjipay.com is not a form. It is Yui, a black cat.
Image 2: Yui open on kanjipay.com, with the two suggested questions and the voice button
What Yui does
Yui lives in the corner on the website. Tap the cat and a panel opens with two suggested questions already waiting: "What can Kanji Pay do?" and "Can I use it for free?" You can type, or press the microphone and ask out loud. Yui answers in Japanese, with a voice and a face that moves while it talks.
The questions Yui handles are the three every software site gets from a first-time visitor:
Pricing and plans. Kanji Pay has a free tier, a Basic plan and a Pro plan. Yui explains which one fits.
What Kanji Pay can do. Advance payment, QR check-in on the day, receipts per attendee, surveys before and after, a free split-bill calculator.
How to get started. Create an event, share the link, done.
None of this is new information. All of it is already somewhere on the site. The difference is that nobody has to find it.
Why a face, not a chat window
This is the third post in our series on projects where the avatar is the product, and Yui is the first one built by a customer rather than by us.
It makes the point better than our own demos do. Kanji Pay could have added a text chatbot with a logo in the corner. Instead they gave the brand a face, a name and a personality, and let visitors talk to it. A first visit to a pricing page is a small negotiation: is this for me, what does it cost, how much work is it. A form makes you do that work alone. A character you can ask does it with you.
That is the version of AI avatars we care about: the way a product introduces itself, rather than decoration on top of it.
Where this fits
The same pattern works for any business whose website has to answer the same three questions all day: software with a pricing page, membership organisations, event platforms, clinics, schools. The avatar carries the brand, the model carries the answers, and the visitor gets a conversation instead of a scroll.
Image 3: the three questions every first-time visitor asks
See Yui, build your own
Meet Yui: kanjipay.com (the site and Yui are in Japanese).
Put an avatar on your site: talk to us. Yui is a Perxona deployment embedded on a live production site, and the same setup works on yours.
For developers: the open-source Perxona Connect Kit is on GitHub at XRSPACE-Inc/perxona-connect-kit, with samples you can run in minutes.
If you want to know what changes when your site has a face, send us a message. We would be glad to talk.
