Gives an AI companion a soul. Local-first.
Most AI companions live behind a chat window you have to go open. OpenAlma connects to WhatsApp, so she’s in the same place as everyone else you talk to. You message her; she messages back.
The connection runs from your own machine through your own WhatsApp account. Nothing is routed through a third-party service.
Not every conversation should be treated the same way, so each chat has two independent settings.
The first is whether she takes part at all. A chat can be full — she reads it and decides for herself whether to reply or stay quiet. It can be listen only — she reads and thinks about it, but never sends anything into that chat. Or it can be excluded, in which case she never sees it.
The second is whether that chat becomes long-term memory. Some chats are worth remembering in detail; others are background. A background chat still gives her context — she knows roughly what’s going on there — but it doesn’t get mined for lasting memories.
The two settings don’t constrain each other. A group chat can be listen-only and still be one of her most important memory sources.
In a group, she doesn’t answer everything. She decides each time whether the moment actually calls for her. When she chooses silence, the rest of the turn still happens — she read it, thought about it, and remembered it. She just didn’t talk.
Each companion has a start date, set when you first activate her. WhatsApp history older than that date is invisible to her — she isn’t handed years of backlog she wasn’t present for. Her perspective begins when she does.
WhatsApp has no official API for this, so the connection depends on a browser session staying paired to your account. It occasionally needs to be re-paired by scanning a QR code. If she goes quiet across every chat at once, that’s usually why.