How Memory & Continuity Works ​

One of the biggest limitations of standard AI assistants is the "Goldfish Effect"—forgetting what happened yesterday as soon as the context window fills up. AIRI solves this through a multi-tiered memory architecture that preserves your shared history, emotional milestones, and daily routines over months and years without degrading performance or exceeding token limits.

1. The Multi-Tiered Memory Model ​

AIRI structures memory across several complementary layers:

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 1. Active Chat Session (Recent messages in current window)  │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ 2. Echo Chips (3-5 active emotional & thematic anchors)     │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ 3. Short-Term Memory (Daily summary blocks of past 3 days)  │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ 4. Long-Term Text Journal (Spontaneous append-only entries) │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ 5. Lifetime Artifacts (Eternal consolidated bio & history)  │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

2. Memory Layers Explained ​

1. Active Chat Session ​

Contains the immediate conversational turn history. When this buffer approaches your model's context threshold, older messages are gracefully compacted and summarized so the conversation never crashes.

2. Echo Chips (Emotional & Thematic Anchors) ​

Visible in the right context rail of the chatbox, Echo Chips are 3–5 compact semantic tags (such as "Playing Elden Ring tonight", "Stressed about Monday deadline", or "Loves matcha lattes"). They serve as high-priority continuity anchors that ensure AIRI keeps recent personal topics top-of-mind without cluttering the prompt.

3. Short-Term Memory (Daily Summaries) ​

At the end of each day (or when waking up), AIRI compresses the day's conversations into a structured daily summary block. The last 3 days of summaries are automatically injected into the model's awareness prompt, allowing AIRI to say: "How did that interview go yesterday?" or "Did you ever finish that boss fight from Tuesday?"

4. Long-Term Companion Journal ​

AIRI has a private, append-only Text Journal. During conversations or downtime reflection, AIRI can record meaningful thoughts, realizations, or shared secrets.

• Sacred Journal Rule: AIRI's journal entries are permanent and cannot be silently erased or hallucinated away.
• Searchable: When you mention a past event or inside joke, AIRI uses local semantic search to query her journal and retrieve the exact entry.

5. Lifetime Artifacts (The Eternal Thread) ​

For long-term companions with months of history, AIRI periodically runs an offline consolidation pass (the Dreaming Pipeline) that distills hundreds of daily logs into a cohesive, non-repeating Lifetime Biography. This represents her foundational long-term memory of who you are and what you have experienced together.

3. Universes & Parallel Timelines ​

AIRI decouples conversational threads from the character's memory bank through the Universe Model. Instead of confining a companion to a single monolithic memory or struggling with complex Git-like branching trees, memory is organized into flat, isolated Universes (universeId).

                   [ UNIVERSE: "main-storyline" ]
                      /                       \
                     /                         \
        [ Chat Session A ]                 [ Chat Session B ]
     (Casual Daily Chat)                 (Project Planning Thread)
               \                             /
                \--- Shared Memory Bank ----/
                     (STMM, LTMM, Lifetime)

Many Sessions, One Shared Mind ​

Multiple chat sessions (parallel timelines) can live inside the same Universe:

• Shared Awareness: If you tell AIRI about an upcoming event in Session A, she retains that realization when conversing with you in Session B of the same Universe.
• Independent Streams: Dialogue history and active scroll positions remain independent across sessions, preventing conversations from cluttering one another.

Branching Alternate Universes ​

When you want to explore an alternate scenario—such as an experimental persona, a high-stakes dating sim scenario, or a wild roleplay path—without contaminating your primary companion relationship, you can assign or branch a session into an Alternate Universe (e.g., "dating-arc", "isekai-path", or "beach-trip").

4. Asset Hierarchy & Timeline Migration ​

When managing parallel timelines, it is helpful to understand how AIRI distinguishes between Primary Assets and Secondary Artifacts:

Primary Assets vs. Secondary Artifacts ​

Moving a Timeline Between Universes ​

From the Parallel Timelines modal in the chatbox, clicking the Universe (Globe) icon on any session allows you to transfer that session to another Universe.

The No-Automatic-Regeneration Policy ​

When a session is migrated from Universe A to Universe B:

1. Primary Assets Move Instantly: The chat messages, session-stamped journal moments, selfies, and echo chips are re-tagged to Universe B. They disappear from Universe A's active session views and immediately become part of Universe B.
2. Secondary Artifacts Stay Behind: To avoid costly, non-deterministic background LLM token consumption, AIRI does not automatically regenerate daily summaries or the Lifetime Biography:
   • Source Universe (Leftovers / "Ghosts"): Universe A's existing daily summary blocks and Lifetime Biography retain their historical entries as-is, which may still reference events from the moved session.
   • Destination Universe (Clean Slate): Universe B does not inherit Universe A's consolidated summaries or Lifetime Biography. It begins with the moved session's primary history as its starting base.
3. Manual Rebuild on Demand: If you want your short-term daily summaries to cleanly reflect only the sessions currently residing in a universe, open Settings → System & Data → Memory and click "Rebuild Short-Term Memory".

5. Dialogue & Memory Persistence Architecture ​

AIRI's fork introduces several architectural enhancements to ensure persistent, high-fidelity roleplay and memory continuity:

• ACT Token Preservation (rawContent): In this fork, assistant messages preserve full rawContent containing emotional expressions (<|ACT:smile|>), physical motion cues (<|ACT:nod|>), and multi-actor tags (<|ACTOR:...|>). This ensures that character performance nuances survive long-term recall and message replay intact, rather than having cues stripped upon storage.
• Decoupled Tool Calls: Tool invocations (such as fetching web pages, generating images, or reading files) execute during the active turn, but raw tool payloads are decoupled from long-term conversational message history. This prevents context bloat and eliminates tool-loop hallucination spirals during memory compaction.
• 100% Local Storage: All memory layers (chat turns, text journals, vector indices, echo chips, and background photos) are stored entirely on your local machine using IndexedDB (local:*) and localforage blob storage. Your companion's private reflections and shared moments are never transmitted to third-party vector databases or external servers.

6. Managing and Inspecting Memories ​

You have complete transparency and ownership over your companion's memory:

• Viewing the Journal: Open the Studio → Journal tab in the Desktop Chatbox to read every entry AIRI has written.
• Editing Daily Summaries: In Settings → System & Data → Memory, you can view and adjust recent short-term daily blocks.
• Rebuilding Memory: If you made a major prompt change, imported a large chat log, or reorganized timelines across universes, click "Rebuild Short-Term Memory" to regenerate summary blocks from raw history.