Reference
This category borrowed most of its vocabulary from machine learning research and then used it in product copy without explaining any of it. The result is that the words which decide whether you enjoy a companion app — persona, memory, context window, filter — are the ones nobody defines. These entries define them.
Three places where the vocabulary is doing real work rather than decorating a feature list.
Two apps can both claim memory and mean entirely different mechanisms — one keeps the recent conversation in view, the other writes facts to storage and fetches them back. Knowing which is which turns a marketing claim into a checkable one.
When a character suddenly forgets a name, the cause is usually structural rather than personal. The vocabulary tells you whether you hit a window limit, a memory cap or a filter, and each of those has a different workaround.
A persona is a budget as well as a description. Understanding that the definition is resent with every reply explains why long, padded character sheets make a companion worse rather than richer.
Each entry is a definition first and an explanation second, so you can stop reading once you have what you came for.
A fictional conversational persona presented through software.
Boys love is a fiction genre centred on romantic relationships between male characters.
A structured description that presents a fictional persona through identity, history, interests and speech.
The amount of text an AI system can consider at one time.
A large language model is a machine-learning model trained to process and generate sequences of text tokens.
Information retained or supplied to inform a later conversation.
A category of story-driven games centred on a protagonist building relationships with a cast of potential romantic partners.
A felt connection with a media figure that does not involve a reciprocal personal relationship.
A description of the identity or perspective you choose to bring to a fictional interaction.
Writing and organising instructions and context to guide a model's output.
Collaborative fiction in which participants take the parts of characters.
A system that checks or restricts inputs and outputs according to a service's content rules.
A romance trope in which familiarity and trust develop gradually.
A unit of text represented internally by a language model; it may be a word, part of a word or punctuation.
Creating synthetic speech designed to resemble a particular voice.
More entries are being written. Terms are added to this list when their page exists, never before — a reference work that links to missing pages is not a reference work.