Persona is an iPhone app where you talk, out loud, with personalities from history and characters of their own. Each one knows who you are, remembers the details of your life from one conversation to the next, and keeps all of it on your phone.
Each personality has a short core character that is always with them and a library of memories of their own life, recalled by topic as the conversation turns to them. Ask about a year, a person or a feeling, and the memories about it come to mind. Many speak in their own characteristic voices.
Florence and Milan, his notebooks, the Last Supper, his machines and his anatomy, the plague years, and the politics and money of his age.
Flies you through 1937: her records, the Electra, the last flight, and what it took to be a woman in the air.
The early days of rock and roll, his influences and where his music came from, as the man might have told it in his time. Ask for a song and he sings one of his own.
His predictions and how he saw the world. He reads the sky the way a sixteenth-century astrologer did, with charts of his own, and will read yours.
The astrologer of Wall Street and Carnegie Hall reads the stars of the Jazz Age, with charts of her own.
A Genoese mariner in the service of Castile: the winds and the stars, the long wait at court, the four crossings, and a man of his century learning, in yours, to doubt some of what he did.
Takes a hard question and reasons it through properly. Ask about science, history or an idea, and expect to be asked something back.
The house assistant: a dry and capable voice that runs the house and keeps its secrets.
More are coming. One of the personas is a companion in the plain sense: not a figure from history but a friend of your own, who knows you, remembers what you tell it and is there to talk with day to day. That is the idea the app grew from.
Tap to talk, or go hands-free and it answers when you pause. The reply starts speaking before it is finished writing, and the words on screen keep pace with the voice. Tap to interrupt.
Each personality greets you differently on every visit, with one detail about their life you have not heard yet.
Every personality has a long list of things to ask that shuffles each time, including questions meant to start a real conversation. They ask questions back where one fits, never twice in a row.
Ask for a long story and get one of three to five thousand words on a proper plot, which you can review and change by voice first. Stories are saved and can be continued, or retold by another character in their own voice and period. You are never a character in them.
Say your birth date and place once and it is remembered under your name. Nostradamus and Evangeline Adams read your chart from real planetary data, each in the method of their own century.
Ask Elvis for a song. He says a little about where it came from and what it meant, then sings it in his own voice.
Help is a personality that explains the app out loud: what Persona is, how memory works, what stays private, what to try first. It can also ask you twelve short questions, hands-free, so every personality knows you from the start.
A talk with an AI version of the developer, in his own voice, about the big picture: what Persona is for, what Zero State believes about AI, and how it treats your data.
A check-in gets a sentence or two. A question about someone's life gets the whole story. Nothing is cut off part-way.
Memory is not a transcript. It is a profile of you, kept up as you talk: a notebook in your own pocket that every personality can read.
Whatever you tell any personality about yourself, every personality knows: your name, your family, your work, what you like and dislike, the stories of your life. Tell Elvis once and Nostradamus knows it too. Each one keeps as its own only its character and its own conversations with you, so you can ask a personality who you spoke with about something, and it will say.
What is learned is filed under headings on a Memories page, with a short profile of you at the top that you can write yourself. Swipe a line away to forget it. Export the whole pack, or delete everything for good, whenever you like.
After every exchange, what you said is turned into short lasting facts about you. Greetings, reactions and passing remarks are not kept.
Facts about you are common to every personality. Character and conversations stay with the personality they belong to.
Personalities notice what they do not yet know about you and ask, now and then, where it fits. Never on a sad or sensitive moment, and never every turn.
A fact you swipe away never comes back, however many times the memory is reorganised.
All of your memories and personal data stay on your phone, and nowhere else.
The voice and the thinking run on one computer of Zero State's own, not in the cloud. It handles each thing you say for that one turn, sends the answer back, and keeps nothing. Nothing goes to an AI company, and nothing of yours is stored on our server.
Nobody else can read your memories or your conversations, Zero State included, with no exception for the beta. You can see, edit or delete all of it on the Memories page whenever you like.
The one thing shared with Zero State is what you say to Help, the app's guide, so the app can be improved. Feedback reports carry versions and timings only, never what was said.
Your memory pack lives in the app's own protected storage, outside of backups. The phone lends it for a session; the session ends and it is gone from the server.
The model runs on Zero State's own hardware. No request leaves for a third-party API.
Export it as a file, or delete it all. Zero State has nothing to delete, because it kept nothing.
Help tells you the same thing out loud, and never claims otherwise.
Every build carries its own number, and the app's About page records what each version changed. The same record, in short, here.
Help asks you twelve short questions about yourself, hands-free, and files the answers on your phone so every personality knows you.
A button on the Help page opens a talk with an AI version of the developer, in his own voice, about what Persona is and how it treats your data. Greetings now stream like replies.
Every personality has a long list of things to ask that shuffles each time, and personalities ask more questions back where one fits. Persona installs and updates from TestFlight.
Every build has its own number, and the About page records what each version changed.
A model picker, a voice monitor for stutter, and a pause between sentences that slows a voice without damaging it.
Long stories told in full, never using you as a character, retold in another character's voice. Christopher Columbus joins.
The text on screen keeps pace with the voice, with an optional scrolling view, and the audio arrives smoothly.
A loading bar, and every personality's first words are on the phone before you tap, so the first reply is quick.
The app becomes Persona, and each personality greets you differently on every visit.
The phone keeps what it learns about you, filed under headings, and a personality can say who you spoke with.
Help is a personality you can ask about the app, with long answers and suggested questions.
Pick a personality, speak to it, and it speaks back, from anywhere. Astrology, songs, joining by name, and each personality keeping its own conversation.
Testers join by name, talk with the personalities, and tell Help what they liked, what did not work and what they would add. If you would like to be one of them, say so and we will be in touch.