A character with an inner life.
The emotion and personality manifold gives a character or companion a persistent inner state, one that responds, remembers and changes through a relationship, instead of being re-prompted every turn.
Two speeds
Who it is, and how it feels.
Traits
Who the character is
- Axes
- Personality traits and values, drawn from established psychology
- Moves
- Slowly, over weeks and months
State
How it feels right now
- Axes
- Valence, arousal, warmth, attention
- Moves
- Turn by turn, and settles back to baseline when nothing is happening
Appraisal
Reading events, not reacting to words.
Events are appraised before they move anything: how new this is, how certain, whether it can be handled, and who caused it. The appraisal moves the state; the traits set how far.
Relationship
Relationships that hold.
Ruptures happen, and repairs count. Warmth earned over weeks doesn’t vanish in one bad exchange, and it doesn’t appear in one good one either.
Expression
Expressed, not labelled.
The state drives the voice and a real-time animated face. What the character feels is what you see and hear, not a mood label pasted on top of a script.
Why a manifold
A prompt can describe a personality. It can't hold one.
Without a persistent state, characters reset, contradict themselves or agree with everything. The manifold gives the language model something true to speak from, and a System 1-type layer keeps each moment's reaction consistent with who the character is.
Status
In development.
Working prototypes. We'll show demonstrations when they're ready to be seen, not before.