Character-based chat and storywriting with large language models: TavernAI is the open-source frontend that leaves model choice to you. It generates no text itself; it connects to the backend of your choice - OpenAI (including GPT-4), Anthropic Claude, KoboldAI and KoboldCpp, Oobabooga's Text Generation Web UI, NovelAI, Ollama, and the crowdsourced Horde - so cost, model quality, and content policy are decided by your backend, not the interface. Characters are defined by portable card files in PNG or JSON format with personality, scenario, and example dialogue, and tens of thousands of community-made cards from sites like Chub.ai import directly. Conversations support group chats with multiple characters, a story mode for long-form writing, message swiping to branch between alternative responses, and full editing of any message. World Info injects lore into context when keywords trigger, keeping long roleplays consistent. Themes, custom backgrounds, and configurable generation settings round out the interface. It runs on Node.js, and the SillyTavern project began as a fork of it.

Your AI characters deserve a home that is actually yours: PocketRisu is a private roleplay chat server where your stories, personas, and worlds live on hardware you control instead of someone else's cloud. Create characters or import them from the wider RisuAI ecosystem, including character cards, modules, lorebooks, and presets, then chat from your computer, tablet, or phone against the same single server. Conversations keep generating on the server even when your screen locks or the connection drops, and reconnecting restores the finished reply instead of a lost message. Switch between OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, DeepInfra, OpenRouter, Ollama, and more, set separate auxiliary models for background tasks, and shape behavior with presets, regex scripts, and plugins. Lorebooks and long-term memory features help long stories stay consistent, automatic translation smooths cross-language roleplay, and text-to-speech plus embedded images, audio, and video make scenes richer. Everything, from characters and chats to inlay images, sits in one SQLite database on your server, so backup and restore are a server-side job rather than a browser export ritual. A built-in dashboard shows disk use per character and module, reclaims snapshot space, and keeps the database optimized, while multilingual interface options welcome players in Korean, English, Japanese, Chinese, and beyond. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. GPL-3.0 licensed.

Project AIRI is the most popular open-source AI companion platform — a self-hosted recreation of Neuro-sama that brings AI-powered virtual characters into your world across web, desktop, and mobile. The system renders Live2D, Spine, and VRM 3D character models with auto-blink, eye tracking, and lip-sync driven by real-time voice synthesis, while the xsAI abstraction layer connects to 40+ LLM providers including OpenAI GPT-4, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, DeepSeek, and local models via Ollama and OpenRouter. Built from day one on WebGPU, WebAudio, Web Workers, WebAssembly, and WebSocket technologies, the browser version runs entirely client-side with PWA offline support while the server runtime enables persistent memory via PostgreSQL with pgvector embeddings and DuckDB WASM for client-side storage. The Minecraft agent plays autonomously using mineflayer with pathfinding, and a Factorio integration provides cooperative gameplay. Social integrations deploy your companion as a Discord bot joining voice channels, a Telegram bot, and a Twitter/X agent posting and replying autonomously. The desktop Stage Tamagotchi app provides an always-on-screen companion for Windows and macOS, while Stage Pocket brings the experience to mobile. Voice features include client-side speech recognition via VAD, multiple TTS providers including ElevenLabs, and screen vision capabilities. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.