PersonaA local-first AI companion app

Characters who live in their own city, remember everything, and stay on your machine.

A world, not a chatbot

Pick a real or fictional city. Persona generates a cast of characters who already know each other — friendships, rivalries, marriages — before you arrive.

Cities & Worlds

🧠

Memory that actually works

Characters remember conversations from months ago. A consolidation pass turns raw chat into searchable long-term memory, retrieved when it matters.

The memory system

📷

Photos, voice, and video

Characters can send photos, voice notes, and short clips. Face-consistency keeps them looking like themselves across every scene.

Media

🔒

Local-first, end to end

Your data lives on your machine in an encrypted SQLite database. API calls go directly to providers — Persona has no server in the middle.

Privacy

✍️

You can be the narrator

Plain text is dialogue. *Wrap a line in asterisks* and you're the narrator — time skips, location jumps, mood changes. Characters accept it as canon.

Chat

🎭

Bring your own characters

Import or share characters as .personapack files — definitions and reference shots travel together, no regeneration needed.

Character Packs

What is Persona?

Persona is a desktop app for macOS and Windows. You run it on your machine, you bring your own AI provider keys, and you talk to characters who live in a city you chose. They have personalities, relationships, memories, and the ability to send you photos, voice notes, and short videos.

Nothing about your conversations is uploaded to a Persona server, because there isn't one. Inference goes straight from your computer to whichever provider you've configured.

Where to start

Download & Install — get the app onto your machine.
First Run — what the init wizard does, step by step.
API Keys & Costs — what each key unlocks and what it'll cost.
FAQ — quick answers to the most common questions.