Chatting
The chat page has four main components to it: The Messages, Side Panel, Saved Conversations, and the Top Bar. Let's start with the messages.
The Messages
The first message is whatever greeting the creator made for the bot. However, you can hover over this in order to view some buttons above the message. These buttons are Edit, Copy, and Generate Dynamic Intro (see image below for reference). You can find them at the top of your character's message when you hover over it. The last option, the sparkles, will use AI to pull from the bot guts and any assigned Attachments to come up with a new message. If you're beginning a chat with an assigned Scenario Attachment, you'll want to do this!
Changing the models affects the type of message you get. Keep in mind that some models excel at some things and not others, have different types of narration, etc. If you happened to have tried out a few of the models and decided on a select few favorites, see the picture with an upcoming explanation below.
At the top of your screen you'll find this rotating arrow icon. Over here, you can quickly swap between your favourited AI models of choice. You don't have to manually go back through the model settings anymore and scroll through the 50 million choices just to find the ones you love. If you already hearted/favourited your preferred models, just go here to quickly switch between them in chat.
Otherwise, if you haven't decided on a favourite model nor favourited one yet, feel free to experiment what is available to you in the settings then select Model Settings.
Now that we're back on track, next to a message (that is not the greeting) you can hit the refresh button (on the right side of the bot's reply) to regenerate their response. If you switched models, this will use the new model. You can jump between generations using the arrows below the message to the left.
The arrows on the bottom right of the message is the Continue button. This will expand upon the current message, though it does frequently mess up the formatting a bit. Keep in mind that this does not count toward the message count on the bot (see image below to see the continue button and bot message preview arrows).
Quick reminder: You can branch off a new chat from any message except the first one. This creates a separate chat that keeps the full history up to the message you branched from. Any replies made after that point in the original chat will not appear in the new one. Don’t worry, the original chat is still saved. Just think of branching as viewing the other path of the story without losing progress!
When or why would you branch off a chat?: Again, it's like viewing the alternate path to your story without losing the progress of your original chat. Let's say that your character generated another interesting reply to your message, but you're stuck between picking that gen and another reply you equally love. That's when it'd be a good time to branch off that particular message you like! This way, you can view the other possible outcome from [x message] while keeping your main roleplay intact!
Note: Make sure that before you branch off, that it's the correct message (for those that generate numerous character responses) you want to reply to.
Moving on from branching, you can also send your own images to your character! The bot will react to the contents of the image, so have fun playing with that (see photo below)!
Persona
At the bottom of the page, over by the send arrow, is an image of your persona. This is where you can easily edit and switch between personas during chat.
Username: This is what the bot will refer to you as in narration and when saying your name, unless they've given you a nickname.
Tagline: This is a field not read by the LLM. This is for you to be able to organize your personas, like "For Royal RP", "For Fantasy", etc.
Description: This is the details of your persona. You can do this in prose or list format, either is fine. There is no character limit, but keep in mind that this does stay in the context memory, so the more you have in here, the quicker you will run over the context memory. I also suggest not putting persona secrets in this box. For example, if you put in there that your persona is an assassin, the bot will most likely know you are an assassin even when they shouldn't.
Set Persona As Default: This is how you actually use the persona. Every chat will default to this persona unless you hit the "Character's Default" button, which is bot-wide, not Variant specific. If you have multiple personas, make sure you are switching the Default when jumping from chat to chat.
How Does the Bot Think Before Responding to Your Text?
You must be thinking about what steps the bot goes through before writing their response to you. Did we guess right? Well, we have an answer. See below.
Before responding, the character/bot will process some essential, existing information before responding to your message. In this specific order, the bot will first think about the dev's backend chatting model prompts and the {{user}} + creator-defined system prompts. Essentially, these are instructions that the dev, bot creator, or you (if you've written any using the Always Active System Prompt box or Attachments) have made for the bot to follow. Those take priority over everything else.
Next comes the character information, the bot's guts. Whatever the bot creator has written into the character's definition will be written out next, the bot always carefully considers what is in it's personality + description before writing out its reply.
After that comes the scenario, the situation that you or the creator wrote in there. The AI will do its best to keep all its responses relevant to the circumstance you are putting them in. Following that comes the example messages, if the bot creator wrote any, then they will do their best to follow the writing style + dialogue that they put in there.
In between the example messages and {{char}}'s first message is {{user}}'s persona information. Whatever information you put in for yourself will be considered by the AI in this area. Although it is not higher in the list, don't fret. There's a special sauce that helps your persona remain relevant in chat and in {{char}}'s responses (history length and all).
Paraphrased "Sauce" information (from dev themself):
The developer has a bit of in-between memory updates for your persona and character progression so it can help the AI stay in character. This is invisible, but it is also how some of you can have 1000+ messages and your chars still remain somewhat in-character.
Going further down the list leaves {{char}}'s first message (the first thing you see when you open a chat with a bot), again, they're following the existing scenario that they were put in. Then, if you, the {{user}} decides to respond, the character will process your reply too and figure out how to appropriately reply to your actions/dialogue.
Now we're at Lorebooks. If the {{char}} has an assigned Lorebook, a very brainy AI will go through all the Lorebook information and pick out what info is befitting of the roleplay depending whether {{user}}'s reply has brought up something relevant one of their entries. From here, it continues to make sure their response to the RP is as relevant to the conversation possible.
We made it to the end: Character second message generated with lorebook entries (again, IF the character has an assigned lorebook). In other words, this is the response your character is generating after reading your ({{user}}) reply. Same process continues from here on. Woohoo! Now you the steps of how the AI thinks before writing its response.
Side Panel
The side panel can be open and closed by hitting the little arrow on the far right of the screen.
On Mobile devices, you can bring this up by tapping the Bot's pfp up at the top left corner!
Clear Chats: This lets you delete multiple messages at once. Turn this on and a small empty box will appear above the pfps of the bot and you. Click those, hit the delete button that appears next to the Send button at the bottom of the screen, and then toggle it back off.
Streaming: This lets you view the text as it's loading in. Turning this off gives you an empty box until it has finished the response, and then it will appear all at once.
Fricc Mode: This is a 'quick goon' button. This makes the bot very horny, and also seems to make aggressive, mean traits more prominent. I do not recommend leaving this on all the time if you are trying to do an actual roleplay.
Configure Responses: This brings up a window with multiple different tabs where you can configure your chat how you want it to work. You can also do this globally within the Profile Preferences. If you do it within the chat, it'll change only for that specific model you're currently using. Please make sure you read these carefully when choosing, as the default might not be to your taste!
Always Active System Prompts
This is a strong field that you can use to manipulate the chat, the scenario, and the memories. I do not recommend leaving a lot in here all the time, only put in what you need in that scene. If you notice the bot forgetting something such as a past conversation, the current location, what clothes they're wearing, etc, toss it in here for a few messages and then delete it once it's back on track.
This is a per-Variant box, not per-Chat. So if you're talking to Variant A but then switch to Variant B, this box will clear. But if you start a new chat on Variant A, the box will still have the same information as it previously had.
Make sure you hit "Set" once you apply any changes.
Lorebooks
This is where you can view the Lorebooks that are natively attached to a bot, and add your own. Currently you can only add your own Lorebooks you have created, which is explained on Lorebooks. Each bot can have 3 Lorebooks natively attached + an additional slot just for you.
Assign Attachments
This is where you can assign attachments such as Scenarios, System Prompts, and UBJs to your chat. You can view how to do so on Attachments.
Saved Conversations
This is where you can jump to all of your chats with this specific bot. This counts all Variants for the bot. The one with the latest sent message should appear at the top. The text is defaulted to whatever the last message was, but if you hit the edit button to the right, you can rename this to something more convenient. The current thread you're on will have "Active" next to it, and have a little highlight.
Top Bar
The sun icon lets you change your theme. There are a handful of defaults to choose from, but you can also make your own. Information on that is found on Themes. The icon next to it is the share button, which gives you the url to the bot. The chat bubble is to start a new chat. The gear brings up a small window.
Messages
This is the number of messages that the bot and you have sent within this specific chat.
Select Character Variants
This lets you switch to a different chat with a different Variant. If the bot only has the default, then it will only show one card. You can hover over the card of your choice to view the Creator Memo for it. You switch to the Variant you want by clicking the check mark up at the top right of the card.
Model Settings
This brings up the window for Models and Model Settings.
History Limit?
Basically this means that it's going to start forgetting older details. It's pretty recommended that you start a new chat if you notice that it's forgetting a lot or that the quality has degraded after this pop up. You can ask the bot in ooc: to give you a comprehensive summary of the plot so far, make sure to turn your output tokens up, then copy that, start a new chat, edit the greeting, and plop it in there.
Different tiers, and the models within those tiers, have different context memory. The context memory gets filled up by the permanent tokens before you even begin chatting: the description + personality + system prompts + always active system prompts fields of the bots, and your persona information.
The rest of it is filled by the messages sent, and is dependent on how long said messages are. So if you like the bot sending longer messages, you'll reach context limit sooner.
But you can click out of the pop up window and ignore it until you start noticing actual issues, and can try to mitigate the forgetting by, when you notice it forgets something, putting it in the always active system prompts box in chat, regen the message until it remembers, then deleting it from the always active system prompt box and continuing.
Generate Custom Images
If a bot has an Image Templates attached to it, you're able to generate images during chatting! This uses the context of the chat along with the template to give you a relevant image. Note that this can be NSFW, but if the template is very specific about the clothing, it's entirely possible that it won't remove the clothing in the generation.
To generate an image within the chat using context, you want to click the picture frame icon between the Persona Image and the Send button. This will only be lit up if you have sent at least one message in the chat.
Alternatively, you are able to use the actual Generate Custom Images button up in the top right, but this takes you to the Image Generation page on Charsnap with the entire template to play with. Generating images here will not use the chat context.
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