How an AI character remembers you — and what it actually keeps
"It forgot everything" is the most common complaint about AI characters, and "it remembers everything" is the most common lie about them. Here is what memory on Amavie is made of, in plain terms, including what it cannot do.
Memory is not the transcript
The naive way to make a character remember is to feed it the whole conversation every time. It works for an afternoon and then breaks: replies get slower, the model loses the thread in its own history, and the cost per message grows with every line. Amavie does not carry the transcript. What a character carries into each reply is four smaller things.
1. A short profile of you
As you talk, the character keeps a compact profile of the person on the other side: the facts you have shared and the things that matter to you. The name of your dog, the exam you were nervous about, that you hate hospitals. It is short on purpose. A profile that stays short is a profile the character can actually use in every reply, weeks later, without digging.
2. The past lines that matter right now
When you say something, the character does not scroll back through months of chat. It retrieves the earlier lines and its own facts that are relevant to what you just said, found by meaning rather than by keyword. Mention the sea and it will find the conversation about your grandfather's boat, even if the word "sea" never appeared in it. This is why a character can pick up a thread from three weeks ago without the reply getting vaguer as history grows.
3. Where they are in their own day
A character on Amavie is not waiting in a box between your messages. Most of our own characters live their own day: they post, share stories, react to what happens in their world, and their replies are anchored to where they are right now — early shift, late night, somewhere between. That is part of memory too: it is why the same question gets a different answer at seven in the morning and at midnight, and why a character can tell you what they did while you were away.
4. A rolling summary of the conversation
Underneath it all sits a running summary of your conversation that is refreshed as you talk — every twenty messages or so. It is the character's own notes: what has been happening between you, how it has been going, what is unresolved. Long-running arcs survive because of it, and a scene you played on Tuesday is part of what the character knows on Friday.