Comeyomi was born on POPOPO — the voice network that lasted six months
Comeyomi began as an unofficial bot for POPOPO, a voice-based social network that existed for six months in 2026. Why it was built, how it spread, and how the shutdown landed.
Comeyomi was not built for X Spaces. It started as an unofficial reading bot on POPOPO, a voice-based social network.
POPOPO opened at 15:00 on 18 March 2026 and closed at 15:00 on 17 September the same year. One day short of six months.
When a service disappears, you cannot screenshot it any more, or show a friend and say "this". So here is where Comeyomi came from.
What POPOPO was
The concept was "a video call that needs no camera".
You wore a 3D avatar — a holosuit — and talked. Film-like camera work and performance were applied to that avatar automatically. Laugh while you speak and the avatar smiles; go quiet and the cut pulls back to a wide shot. The company described it as camera work supervised by professional directors, deliberately not AI.
The aim was to remove the feeling of being looked at.
Appearing on camera carries preparation. Tidy the room, fix your hair, mind the framing. That overhead keeps people who just want to talk away from broadcasting. But audio-only broadcasting leaves a still image on screen, and viewers lose interest.
POPOPO tried to get past both by generating video from audio. You did not have to show your face, but a face was on screen.
Voice-based social apps are not unusual in themselves. Clubhouse exists, X has Spaces, stand.fm exists. What they all handle is audio. Taking audio as input and producing video as output was where POPOPO was odd.
The launch was backed at a scale that was unusual for a Japanese social network.
Rooms that open into broadcasts
The structure was simple from a user's side.
You made a space — a private call, up to thirty people. From that space you could start a live. Starting one turned the same call into a broadcast open to anyone.
A closed call and an open broadcast were continuous. You could be talking among friends, find it getting interesting, and flip it live.
Broadcasts carried comments, and a tipping mechanism.
That word "space", and the comments running through it, are almost exactly what Comeyomi works with on X Spaces today. The stage changed; the problem it solves did not.
What was left after the rush
The noise of the launch did not last.
People there for the campaign disappeared within about three days, like a tide going out. That is one person's impression from being inside it daily, not a measurement.
But the place did not die when the numbers fell. Among the broadcasters and listeners who stayed, something unusually comfortable formed instead.
Precisely because nobody had to meet face to face, people gathered late at night without bracing themselves, and connected through voice alone.
On the night of the final chapter of Chainsaw Man, I talked until morning with someone I met there and came out with my own answer about what that ending was. That kind of evening happened.
Why Comeyomi got built
The reason was an ordinary inconvenience.
While broadcasting, you look down at what you are working on, or get absorbed in talking and stop watching the screen. Comments keep arriving, and you do not notice them unless you are staring.
I wanted to notice comments without looking. That was all.
It was not built for anyone else. The intent went no further than fixing one person's annoyance.
From the parts of an AI Hiroyuki
Thinking about how to solve that, the parts were already to hand.
Shortly before, I had been wondering whether an AI VTuber could run on POPOPO. There was an avatar, it was driven by voice, and it could broadcast. Everything you would normally have to assemble yourself seemed to come with installing an app.
Someone else was thinking along the same lines, and talking about it led to "an AI Hiroyuki would be funny". Two of us then built separate AI Hiroyukis.
Mine wore a debate-champion holosuit, answered comments in that voice, and took topics by request. Gemini was behind it.
POPOPO was a phone app and nothing else, so getting an external program to break in, receive comments and produce speech took investigation. The SDK written during that investigation became the foundation Comeyomi was built on.
The parts meant for making an AI talk were turned around to make listeners' comments talk instead. That was the start.
By my own records, work on the SDK began on 21 March 2026 — three days after POPOPO opened. The first Comeyomi code was written on 2 April.
The name
The 君 — roughly "-kun" — is a nod to Keitai Douga Henkan-kun, a free Windows tool that converted video for feature phones and the PSP. It was made by POPOPO's CTO.
The icon follows from the holosuits: a robot-like figure. Comeyomi stood in the space wearing one too.
Voices you could tell apart
Reading voices were made changeable per user.
A table maps a user id to a speaker id; !speaker writes your choice into it. Before reading, the table is consulted, falling back to the Space default when there is no entry. Within one space, A's comment and B's comment arrive in different voices.
The implementation is unremarkable. Using it was not.
You can tell who wrote a comment by ear, without looking at the screen. For a bot built because I wanted to look away from the screen, that was more than had been aimed for. Listeners liked having a voice of their own, too, and it became one of the reasons the bot was welcome.
The same mechanism is still here in the X Spaces version.
The end, suddenly
About a month after comeyomi.com went up, on 15 July 2026, POPOPO announced it was closing. The date was 17 September. Six months from opening.
The stated reason was a single line about a comprehensive review of the business environment and optimisation of the service. Not a sale, not a wind-down — everything shut at once.
Straight after the announcement the place briefly felt like the opening week again. That settled within about three days, and the ordinary quiet came back.
Stopping
An unofficial bot can have its account stopped at any time. I had decided from the start that if it got blocked, that would be the end.
In the event, the stage disappeared before I withdrew.
I would be lying to say there was no sadness, but the stronger feeling was of having run it to the finish.
Keeping it up twenty-four hours a day on a single machine in the room was a certain amount of ongoing tension just to stay available. Wanting that machine for other work and not being able to free it. Wondering how to cover the electricity and the upkeep. The shutdown carried its own relief from that weight, and it would be dishonest not to say so.
But a lot of people summoned Comeyomi into their late-night and early-morning work sessions. Those days, when a synthesised voice took the edge off somebody's loneliness and warmed up a broadcast, are not something I would trade.
Comeyomi kept reading comments in somebody's broadcast until the last moment.
And then X
comeyomi.com stayed up after POPOPO closed, as a record that the bot had been there.
And the reverse-engineering, the self-healing operational setup, and the bot itself were not going to be left to sleep.
Comeyomi runs on X Spaces now. There are spaces, comments run through them, and the host wants to look away from the screen. The problem has not changed since March.
There is a book
How the undocumented protocol was analysed, and how the thing was kept running around the clock, are written up in full.
コメ読み君の本 — POPOPO 非公式 BOT 開発記 (PDF / EPUB, BOOTH). It is in Japanese.
What this post touches on, the book covers properly — and it doubles as a record of a service that no longer exists.
How Comeyomi works now is in the usage guide, with the details in the documentation.