On a Saturday morning, a user on Soul App, the Chinese AI social platform, posts that she wants to take a short hike that afternoon and asks if anyone nearby would like to join.
A few minutes later, A group anchor appears under the post, indicating that other nearby users share the same short-term plan. Tapping it opens a temporary interest group for coordination. The interaction is enabled by Soul App’s recently launched instant interest groups, which use AI to identify short-term plans in posts and gather users around them.
A new function for spontaneous plans
The feature grew out of user activity already taking place on Soul App. Each week, around one million posts on Soul App signal an immediate, lightweight intention — “I want to do X right now, with someone.” Over 7% point directly to offline scenarios such as dining, sports, exhibitions, City walk, board games and watching events..
When a user publishes a post, Soul App’s AI system analyzes the text in real time. It looks for time signals such as “tonight,” “this weekend,” or “after work,” and identifies the activity described in the post.
When the system identifies a clear short-term interest, it can suggest starting an activity broadcast and extract information such as time, location and interest tags. These details are used to distribute the post to users in a similar area and time period with relevant interests.
The post can also carry a group anchor showing that other users are discussing the same activity. Users can tap the anchor to join a temporary interest group, where they can continue the discussion and coordinate the plan.
Before instant interest groups, many of these requests were scattered across posts and comments. Users largely had to wait for someone to notice the request and respond. The feature now routes these short-term plans from the original post to relevant users and, when there is interest, into a temporary group.
Social needs are becoming more situational
The 2026 Social Trends Report, jointly released by Soul App’s Just So Soul Institute and Fudan University, describes young people’s social patterns as becoming more flexible and centered around specific activities.
In 2025, more than 3.746 million Soul App users published 8.325 million “dazi”-related posts, which generated over 9.8 billion views.
Reading the moment with AI
Soul, the AI ecosystem company behind Soul App, has long built its social experiences around interests and emotional expression rather than relying mainly on profiles or other surface-level signals. Its interest graph, AI-driven recommendation system and proprietary SoulX model help Soul App understand user interests and social intent.
In instant interest groups, these AI capabilities help Soul App understand what a post is asking for and connect it with relevant users.
Early results from a pilot in Kunming were encouraging. Within the first week of launch, the conversion rate from seeing group information to clicking to join exceeded expectations.
Sometimes a social connection starts with something as small as a plan. Instant interest groups give those passing plans a better chance to get a response while they still matter. For Soul App, that means giving users more opportunities to turn what they want to do in the moment into an experience shared with someone else.
