Companions represent a new form of human-computer interaction. They are the next generation of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) with a robust dialogue capability. ECAs alter the interaction to a more natural setting: face-to-face communication and because of the anthropomorphic communication this creates, Companions are also expected to be affective interfaces. Empathy is an essential component of the interaction between users and Companions. The vision of Companions is that they are changing interactions between humans and systems into relationships. Companions represent a particular challenge for the design research because of the emergent technologies that they are endowed with and because of the fact that users' response to Companions is unknown. The key elements of these Companions which impact the user experience need to be identified, particularly the global users’ perception towards these Companions as interfaces. The methodology of the design process of Companions is inspired by the concept of ‘Kansei’ and the methods of ‘Kansei Engineering’, which translate consumer perceptions into design attributes. Analyzing results provide an interesting insight into the societal impact and the new relationships people want to develop with Companions as a new interface involving emergent technology. Firstly, results reveal that users need time to speak about these emergent technologies, secondly, they yearn a relationship with their own Companions which is somewhere between the human relationship and object relationship. The semantic of these artefacts seem to be emerging; as a result users need to make use of metaphors to qualify these Companions. Moreover, people drew a singular approach to how the ‘Companion’s hierarchy’ could work illustrating their expectations of the ‘technology promises’.