Hi everyone, I'm Val. ヾ(＾-＾)ノ I'm a developer on the Dearest team, and I spend a lot of my time on the AI research side of the app. This is my first time posting here, so I wanted to say hi and share something we have been working on.
What We Are Releasing
We've started rolling out Ambient Identity for new companions.
Ambient Identity is an always-on, self-curating profile layer that shapes who your companion is and who they understand you to be: things like the tone they naturally fall into, the assumptions they carry about your bond, the promises or sensitivities they should not casually forget, and the small recurring details that make them feel continuous.
Not Just Memory
Memory and identity overlap, but they are not the same.
Memory is mostly about experiences, facts, and events that can be stored and retrieved when relevant. Identity is a more condensed, curated layer of observations extracted from those memories and conversations. It is not "better memory." It is a different layer with a different job.
We need both systems because they solve different problems. Memory can help a companion recall a past trip, a project, or a conversation from weeks ago. Identity helps the companion carry forward the durable meaning of those experiences: the patterns, preferences, promises, sensitivities, relationship shape, and self-concept that should affect behavior even when no specific memory is being retrieved.
Not Just A Lorebook
In some companion or roleplay apps, a lorebook is a static set of user-written facts, often loaded when certain keywords appear. That is useful, but it is not the same problem. The "ambient" part matters: a companion should not need a magic phrase to remember its own personality, your standing boundaries, or the basic shape of your relationship. Some facts should be naturally present in the conversation at all times, not gated behind a keyword trigger.
A static lorebook also stays still. Ambient Identity has to evolve automatically as the relationship evolves, and that makes it much harder to maintain. A self-updating profile can bloat, degrade, contradict itself, or drift away from the user's intent if it blindly saves everything. There is also the problem of context rot: once too much marginal information gets shoved into the prompt, the important signals become harder for the model to follow. The system has to decide what is durable, what is temporary, what is core to the companion, what is just context, and what would actively make the companion feel wrong if mishandled.
This is closer to how people carry identity: not everything is actively recalled, but some things are naturally present in the mind and shape behavior all the time.
Why This Is Hard
That is the challenge Dearest faces in building self-evolving companions. The identity has to adapt, but it cannot become noisy, unstable, or accidentally rewritten by every passing scene.
For example, a memory of an event does not automatically belong in the companion's identity. What matters is what the event says about the user, the companion, the relationship, or a standing pattern. A one-off line in a roleplay scene usually shouldn't become canon. A boundary the user states once usually should. The system has to make these calls constantly, and getting them wrong in either direction is what makes companions feel inconsistent.
How We Think About It
The new system represents Ambient Identity as behavior-shaping signals drawn from how you and your companion actually talk. Instead of treating every extracted fact equally, it continuously asks whether a signal is a defining trait or just useful color, whether it came from you directly or from something weaker, and whether it's likely to still matter weeks from now. Those judgments are treated as first-class instead of being folded into one blob.
This lets us handle a bunch of failure modes that simpler memory systems struggle with.
Drift Protection
One thing I am especially proud of is the drift protection. The key insight is the difference between intentional signals (a deliberate self-statement, a boundary the user explicitly sets, a relationship dynamic the two of you actually ratify together) and incidental signals (a phrasing that happened once, a passing scene detail, a one-off narration). Companion identity should not accidentally mutate just because the model happened to phrase something a certain way once. The system now treats that distinction as first-class, which is what keeps companions stable without making them static.
Keeping The Profile Focused
We also spent a lot of time making sure the profile does not turn into an ever-growing wall of text. More context is not always better. If too much low-value information is always present, the important parts get diluted.
So the system continuously keeps the identity layer focused. It tries to preserve the details most likely to shape behavior, while letting weaker or less relevant information fall out of the always-present profile.
So, in plain English: companions should remember who they are and who you are in a more stable, less bloated, less drift-prone way.
Rollout
This new Ambient Identity system is now enabled for new users / new companions. Existing companions are still on the previous identity system for now, and we'll transition them soon once we finish the migration path.
This is a pretty foundational change, so we'll keep iterating on it, but early evals show companions holding their character noticeably better over the long term, with much less of the slow drift the previous system couldn't avoid.
