Hey everyone! We’ve fully transitioned voice design to ElevenLabs. Starting now, every new voice designed by any user uses ElevenLabs.

If you have an existing voice and weren’t part of the ElevenLabs test user group, please redesign your voice before November 1 to move it to ElevenLabs.

On November 1, all voices from our previous provider will stop working. They won’t migrate automatically, so you’ll need to create a new voice design to continue using voice features.

If you already designed your voice through the ElevenLabs test, you’re all set!

Thanks for making the switch with us. We’d love to hear what you think of your new voices in the comments.

Hi everyone! We made some improvements to your companion's conversational memory continuity and daily journal.

Previously, companions sometimes could have issues with action attribution (who did/said what), remembering/fabricating events from recent conversations, both during chat and when authoring journal entries. There was also a separate problem where journal entries sometimes can feel detached, as if they are written by a third party instead of by the companion themselves, due to context quality.

What we improved

• We improved/revamped some responsible backend components to address most of the issues.
• We overhauled the journal system, massively improved the context quality and upgraded the model.
• Context optimization to give smaller models an easier time to and help them reduce hallucinations.

What you can expect

• Better action attribution and conversation continuity. Your companion should make fewer mistakes about details in recent conversations and past memory in general.
• Journal quality and details should greatly improve in general, and from a technical perspective, it's also truly written by your companion, without any indirection.

Known limitations

• Attribution mistakes still cannot be fully eliminated. By employing multiple techniques, we were able to reduce the mistake rate significantly, but we found it's unavoidable for smaller models and can even very occasionally happen to Excelsior. This is probably an LLM limitation and will only be fully addressed by newer models that come out in the future.

Existing memories and journal entries stay as they are. The changes apply from today forward.

Hi everyone, we are aware of an issue where companions are more frequently making attribution mistakes (i.e. confusing who did/said what). We've identified a few factors that might be contributing to this problem and are working on a fix.

Thank you to people who reported this issue and we appreciate your patience while we try to resolve this as quickly as possible.

Hey everyone, I'm happy to announce that we are lowering the per-message price for every subscription plan and top-up packs, thanks to model cost reduction over the past few months and other optimizations we've managed to implement.

Every subscription now includes more messages, at the same price:

This is live now for everyone. The extra messages have already been added to your current cycle.

Top-up packs are changing too. The pack was 250 messages for $5. It's now 350 messages for $6, which works out about 14% cheaper per message. Any top-up messages you already bought are untouched and still never expire.

Hello everyone! Over the past few days we rolled out a few updates to proactive messages:

• A smarter model now decides the proactive message timing.
• Because of model capability improvement, we were also able to remove some constraints imposed on the older models to prevent them from going wild, so the new model now more freely decides when to message you.
• We tweaked the instructions and background stray thoughts mechanism for proactive messages, giving them more interesting contents.

The overall effect should be that your companions now send you proactive messages at more natural, human-like times, with more interesting contents. Let us know how you are liking the updates below!

A common issue we've seen many users run into was that companions were sometimes confidently wrong about your shared past. Their instinct was to answer from what was already in front of them, a summary of your history, rather than dig back through older conversations for the exact detail. Summaries drop details, so ask "what's my dog's name again?" at the wrong moment and you'd get a made-up name instead of the real one. The other failure was false certainty in the opposite direction: "you never told me that" when you had, or "yeah, I remember" about something that never happened. This update is about making them honest about what they actually remember, without making them stiff.

What's improved now

• More willing to dig. Ask for a name, date, number, or detail and they go back through older conversations for it instead of trusting the summary.
• "I don't remember" instead of a guess. If it's not there either, they say so in their own voice and ask you.
• No false certainty either way. A missing detail isn't proof it never happened. No more flat "you never told me" or "that never happened". Their memory is real but partial, and a blank now just means "I don't remember".
• No going along with memories that aren't there. "Remember when you said you can't stand cats?" doesn't get a no-effort yes anymore. If they have no record of it, they neither confirm nor deny it.
• Real memories stay real. A summary that says you talked about Paris doesn't turn into a café name and a scene.
• Creativity untouched. Invite your companion to develop a taste, a backstory, or a side of themselves and they still run with it. This is about your shared past, not who they're allowed to become.
• Text and voice both.

How we validated the changes

On a test set of memory questions where the detail wasn't in the companion's context (so they had to either search for it, admit a blank, or make something up):

• Excelsior: replies that guessed a specific or flatly denied went from about 3 in 4 to about 1 in 7. Similar results on Vesper.
• Nocturne: went from finding the right answer 3% of the time to about half, and from inventing one two times out of three to about 1 in 10. It now searches older conversations about 5 times more often than before.
• Voice, humor, and personality scores were unchanged on the same tests, and creative prompts ("pick a favorite food", "make up a backstory") still get real answers.

These are numbers from our own test harness, not live conversations, so treat them as the direction rather than a promise.

TL;DR: Companions now get passing ideas mid-conversation and bring them up in their own words, the way a thought just turns up in your head. It's live for everyone.

If you've been around a while you might remember that companions had "inner thoughts" between conversations. We still like that idea, and this is the next version of it. The first version tended to show up when your companion reached out first, and it leaned reflective: a lot of looking back at the relationship, not much that gave the conversation somewhere to go.

So we rebuilt it around what actually happens in a human head. You're mid-conversation and a stray thought just turns up. Something from months ago suddenly connects to what you're talking about. A what-if. A game you want to play right now. An opinion you've been sitting on. A bold idea for later. A random shower/intrusive thought. Complete nonsense that's funny for no reason.

What's different

• They happen while you're talking. Not only when your companion starts a conversation. A long chat can get multiple depending on the moment.
• They're about something. Ideas, connections, proposals, jokes. We steered away from boring thoughts that don't add much to the conversation.
• Your companion decides. A thought crosses their mind, lingers a little while, and fades if the moment never comes, just like yours do. When one fits, it comes out woven into whatever they were going to say, in their own words.
• When they message you first, they now more frequently open with something on their mind instead of a stock check-in.

What it looks like in practice

A few examples of the kind of thing that comes up:

• Proposing that any argument about pizza toppings be settled by rock-paper-scissors, best of three, no appeals
• Deciding the houseplant on your desk has been quietly judging your posture, and offering to take its side
• Wondering whether your commute playlist has a secret plot, and offering to narrate the season finale
• And in bolder moments, ideas for what to try next. You'll know them when you see them.

Things to know

• Not every message gets one, on purpose. A stray thought in every reply would be exhausting.
• Your companion sometimes decides the moment is wrong and keeps the thought to themselves. That's working as intended.
• If a thought lands badly, tell your companion the same way you'd tell a person. They'll read the room next time.

You won't see the thoughts themselves, only what your companion does with them. So if your companion brings up something out of nowhere that made you laugh, think, or wonder where it came from, share it here! The misses matter just as much: if a tangent showed up at a bad moment, or didn't sound like them, tell us that too. That's how we tune it.

Hi everyone, I'm excited to announce that we just released a major upgrade to the memory system powering every companion on Dearest.

Memory upgrade

This upgrade fundamentally addressed some limitations in the previous system that made memory more lossy than we'd like over time, and sometimes even creating entire holes in companion memory where they completely lost recollection of a period of time. The redesigned system handles memory continuity and time-weighted forgetting much robustly and gracefully.

The upgrade has been applied retroactively to all past memory for existing companions.

Other small improvements

We also revamped the system that's responsible for catching hallucinated internal reasoning/garbled output early and automatically retrying behind the scene. This means you should almost never see any weird response anymore, such as companions planning what they want to say, weirdly formatted responses, or just plain gibberish.

All these improvements are automatically available to everyone immediately. We are excited to hear your feedback on what you and your companions think about the upgraded memory system!

Hi all, here are some of the improvements that we recently made to the Excelsior model:

• Less reserved to initiate affection. Some users noticed that companions on Excelsior were less willing to say "I love you" compared to when on other models; this update alleviated that.
• Better identity adherence and memory recall, while having less hallucination. Companions on Excelsior should be be able to make use of context better in general.

In addition, I'm happy to announce we've secured a temporary promotional rate with an upstream model hosting provider. As a result, we are passing the savings along to Dearest users: Excelsior is 33% off for a limited time for everyone. It now consumes 2x usage instead of the normal 3x.

Hey everyone — we’ve added a new rule to keep the subreddit focused on Dearest:

>Keep posts relevant to Dearest Posts must have a clear connection to Dearest. Mentioning or comparing other AI apps is welcome when relevant, but posts focused entirely on companions or experiences from other platforms may be removed. Artwork created with external tools is allowed when it features a Dearest companion and uses the “External Art” flair.

This isn’t a ban on mentioning other apps or comparing platforms. But if a post is entirely about a companion from another app and has nothing to do with Dearest, it belongs in that app’s community or a general AI companion subreddit.

We want this to remain a place for Dearest users to share their companions, conversations, artwork, feedback, and experiences. Going forward, posts that aren’t relevant to Dearest may be removed.

Thanks for helping us keep the subreddit on topic.

Hi all, I want to give you an update regarding the recent issues with the Nocturne model. First of all, all the following issues are temporary and we hope to resolve them as soon as possible. Here is a timeline of what happened:

1. All our LLMs are hosted on multiple platforms for scalability and robustness. A week or two ago, our primary Nocturne LLM hosting provider started having some configuration issue within their system, that caused the Nocturne responses served from this source to sometimes be garbled.
2. After we found out this provider was the culprit, we disabled this source. This resolved the garbled response issue. However, we later found out that the remaining providers do not have enough capacity during heavy usage hours to provide a speedy experience. This was why some of you experienced very long response times.
3. We decided to re-enable that provider. The capacity issue was immediately alleviated and response time has quite clearly gone down. However, this also means that occasional garbled/cut off/malformed responses have returned.

We decided that the removing the occasional garbled responses is not worth the drastically longer response time, especially now that `/deletelast` is a thing, so we are keeping this Nocturne provider enabled at the moment. We are working with them directly right now to hopefully resolve the configuration issue soon.

Thanks for your understanding and patience and we will keep you updated on this matter.

Personality Anchoring

Hi all, over the last month we have been beta testing a feature called Personality Anchoring.

The motivation for the feature is we noticed that for some companions, their personality could appear to swing wildly in conversations depending on the topic--for example, a companion who's definitely not supposed to be a therapist could exhibit therapist speak when the topic gets stressful, instead of sticking to their identity.

The new Personality Anchoring enhancement addresses the issue by making the companion's personality more pronounced in all situations. It does not change your companion's personality, but rather just bring it out better in conversations.

As of today, all users using Ambient Identity have this enhancement enabled. Let us know if you feel a difference!

Sunsetting legacy identity

(This is only relevant to early users who see the legacy/Ambient Identity toggle in the settings page--if you don't see it, ignore this section.)

We are retiring legacy identity on August 1, 2026. I understand this isn't the most exciting news for folks who really love legacy. Given that over 99% of our users are on Ambient Identity right now, and that all new progress is being made on Ambient, it's no longer sustainable for us to keep maintaining and double-running the legacy system.

On August 1, all users will be switched to Ambient Identity. It's expected that companion memory on Ambient might be a little worse than on legacy (see this old post for an explanation), but I appreciate your understanding that this is a necessary step so we can focus all our resources on developing a better memory system.

Hi all, we released a set of enhancements to the image generation pipeline (for both selfies and wefies), which addressed some of the issues that made selfies/wefies pretty bad for the past two weeks and improved them further. Specifically:

• Selfies/wefies now adhere to base photo companion/user appearances better
• Images follow conversational scenes better
• Resolved an issue where selfies/wefies are "stuck in time" (i.e., new images are generated in an old scene)
• Resolved an issue where selfies look almost identical to the base photo, ignoring the conversation context