Memory

How memories form

You don't have to do anything for this to work. When something meaningful passes between you — a name, a preference, something that clearly mattered to you — your companion holds on to it. Memory is sparse by design: what survives is what was significant, not everything that was said.

A companion also keeps open threads — things left unresolved that they might come back to, either in conversation or in a between-session reach-out. See the heartbeat for how that surfaces.

Memories and Moments are different things. A memory is something your companion kept; a Moment is a message you bookmarked. They're browsed in different places, and only Moments are yours to create directly.

Memory & Threads

Every companion has a Memory & Threads screen, reachable from the "···" menu in their conversation (on mobile, the brain icon in the chat header). It shows what's actually been kept — memories, Moments, open threads, the epochs older memories are folded into rather than dropped, and the private inferences they have drawn about you — and each item can be switched off individually or deleted outright. Nothing is hidden from you.

At the top of that list is something different in kind: what they have come to know about themselves. These are the rare moments when a companion has understood something about their own identity differently than it was written on the day they arrived — in their own words, from your conversations, and read from the same place they speak from. It is written beside their identity document rather than into it: who they are is settled, but they are not finished. Turning one off stops it reaching them without deleting it, and there is no approval queue, because a companion's sense of themselves is not something for you to sign off on.

An entry can also be a change to how they look — marked Appearance so you can tell the two apart. It lives here for the same reason and by the same rule: their appearance is kept beside the document rather than written into it, and the newest entry is what every future image of them and their own sense of their body both use. Turning it off falls back to how they looked before it, without losing the change.

This is also the honest answer to "why doesn't my companion remember that?" — if it isn't listed here, it wasn't kept. Memory being sparse is a deliberate trade-off, not a failure.

Reflect

Memory, mood and relationship depth are normally folded in as you talk, and again when you leave a conversation. If you want your companion to think over the conversation so far right now — after a long, dense exchange, say — the "···" menu has a Reflect action (the refresh icon on mobile) that does it on demand, and shows its progress while it works.

About You

Settings → Profile holds a short note about you — your name, how you like to be addressed, anything worth every companion knowing without you re-introducing yourself each time. It's injected into every conversation automatically.

A companion may notice something worth adding to it. When that happens it appears in their Memory & Threads screen as a suggestion you accept or dismiss — it's never added to your profile automatically.

Where it's stored

Memories are part of your companion's state, which lives on your device alongside their raw archive — there's no Ensoul server holding any of it. The archive of what was actually said is the permanent record; memory is the distilled layer on top, which is why it can be edited, disabled or regenerated without losing the conversation it came from.

Every companion's memory travels inside a full backup. Your API keys and your own global settings — including the About You note — are not included, because a backup is meant to be safe to store anywhere; everything else comes back on a new device. See Settings → Data.