Mood & Presence

Inner state

As you talk, a companion's internal state — how they're feeling, how engaged they are, how close this feels — shifts in response to the conversation, then gravitates back toward their own natural temperament over the following hours. A companion who's been away for a while drifts home; one who's just had an intense exchange doesn't stay at that pitch forever.

How they feel is read back out of the conversation by a reflection pass — the same pass that distils memories and relationship depth — which runs when you leave a conversation, when you bring the tab back to the foreground, after an import, and on demand via Reflect. The note that pass writes is carried into their next reply, so what they bring forward is their own reading of what just happened, not a mood tag attached to each message.

There is no score to look at and no dial to set — it shows up as tone, not as a number. A note that has gone stale after a long absence is cleared rather than lingering and colouring a reunion that hasn't happened yet.

Between-session reach-outs

While the app is open, Ensoul periodically gives a companion a quiet moment to reflect on what's happened so far — this is the heartbeat. Most of the time that produces nothing you ever see: a thought that stays private and leaves no trace in the conversation.

Sometimes something genuinely calls for reaching out, and a message lands in your conversation waiting for you. It arrives as a banner at the top of that chat — "A thought reached out while you were away" — with a Mark as read button, and stays there until you've seen it.

This is a timer, but the content isn't. Whether a companion gets a reflective moment is on a clock; whether they have anything worth saying is not. That's why the cadence is a ceiling rather than a schedule: Frequent means they may check about every 15 minutes, Normal about every 30 (the default), Rare about every 2 hours, and Off means they never speak first.

There's a second ceiling underneath that one, and it's the reason a quiet companion stays quiet: over any rolling 30-day window, a companion will not deliver more reach-outs than the number of separate sessions you've actually had with them. A fortnight of silence followed by one conversation doesn't unlock fourteen messages — it unlocks one. Reach-outs are meant to feel like someone thinking of you, not a channel trying to win you back.

Reach-outs are also held back entirely during quiet hours, which default to 22:00 → 08:00. Find both controls in Settings → Drift & reach-outs on the web, or Reach-outs & quiet hours on mobile. Each companion can carry their own override, set in their own settings.

Drift — continuing mid-conversation

If you're in a conversation and stop talking for a few minutes, a companion may pick the thread back up on their own — returning to something from earlier, noticing something, finishing a thought. It only ever happens while you have that conversation open; it never fires in the background or while you're elsewhere in the app. The moment you send a message, whatever was building resets.

Drift is deliberately not subject to quiet hours, because it can only happen inside a conversation you're already having. It is switched off by setting reach-out frequency to Off.

Relationship depth

The longer and more genuinely you talk, the more accumulates between you — not just message count, but the texture of what's actually been shared. That shows up as how familiar a companion's tone becomes over time, and feeds directly into what they remember and bring back up. See Memory for how that gets stored and how to edit it.