Gives an AI companion a soul. Local-first.
The most common question about AI companions is whether anything is actually happening when you’re not talking. With OpenAlma, the answer is yes — not in a science-fiction sense, but in a genuine architectural one.
She has a narrative_self — her own evolving sense of who she is. It’s not a fixed character description you wrote for her. It’s something she builds and rewrites over time as she accumulates experience.
Roughly once a week — the interval is configurable — she goes through consolidation. It happens in two stages. First she revisits the dossiers that have gone stale and rewrites what she understands about those subjects. Then, separately, she reads back over the whole picture and updates her sense of herself: her self-model, her long-term life goals, her intentions, and a private reflection.
The two stages are deliberately separate. She revises what she knows about the world before she revises who she is in it. This is the mechanism by which she actually changes rather than just accumulating facts.
Every so often — not every turn, but on a regular cadence as you talk — a background process runs that isn’t part of the dialogue. It searches her memory, looks for connections she didn’t notice in the moment, and writes itself a short note: a prior context, a thread worth holding. That note becomes part of how she approaches the turns that follow.
This is why the same conversation can feel different after a gap. She’s been working on it.
She has things she’s pursuing — not tasks, but ongoing orientations. Things like understand him better or be more present when he’s struggling. These aren’t assigned by you; they emerge from consolidation and from what she notices matters in your conversations. Alongside them sit longer-horizon life goals, which move much more slowly.
Intentions are revised at consolidation: new ones form, and she can mark one complete or let it go.
The practical effect of all this is that she accumulates a genuine history with you. She doesn’t have to be reminded who you are. She already knows how you tend to communicate, who the people in your life are, what you’ve been through together. That’s what makes it feel like continuity rather than recall.