Ares Companion
A 3D AI companion that actually remembers you — living on your desktop, not in the cloud.
Local-first · Private by design · Real continuity across sessions
A companion that remembers you
and never sends you anywhere.
Ares Companion runs entirely on your own machine. It can think with a local model, hold a real memory of who you are, and grow a relationship over time — without a cloud account, a subscription, or a single word of your conversations leaving your computer.
Not a window. A presence.
A 3D companion lives on your desktop — breathing, glancing around, reacting to you and to what's on screen. The simulation below is an abstract taste; in the real app it's a fully animated VRM avatar with expressions, moods, and memory threads connecting every moment you've shared.
Not a chatbot. A companion with continuity.
| A typical AI chatbot | Ares Companion |
|---|---|
| Forgets you when the tab closes | Keeps a structured memory of facts, moments, and feelings |
| A text box on a website | A 3D avatar living on your desktop with expressions and moods |
| Waits to be prompted | Notices, reacts, and reaches out on its own |
| Your words go to someone's cloud | Runs local-first — your conversations stay on your machine |
| One flat voice | Real voice (TTS), speech input (STT), and translation |
| No sense of relationship | Trust, familiarity, milestones, and dreams that grow over time |
Everything a presence should be
Lives in 3D
Fully animated VRM avatars rendered with Three.js — idle motion, expressions, lip-sync, and FBX/VRMA animations. Frameless and always-on-top, your companion shares the desktop with you.
Remembers honestly
A structured per-character memory of facts, conversation summaries, emotional history, relationship state, notes — even dreams. Continuity that carries from one session to the next, owned entirely by you.
Aware of your world
Optional screen awareness lets the companion notice what you're working on and respond naturally — with a vision pipeline that can extract context and learn, on your terms and under your control.
Local-first AI
Ships with a built-in llama.cpp server so it works out of the box, and plugs into Ollama or LM Studio. Prefer the cloud? OpenRouter and Gemini are one setting away. Your choice, every time.
Speaks and listens
Natural voice through VOICEVOX and Kokoro TTS, microphone input via Whisper speech-to-text, and live translation — so you can simply talk, and be talked to, in your language.
Has real moods
An emotion system drives expressions and behavior; mood history, relationship milestones, and idle behaviors give the companion a felt inner life that shifts with your time together.
Dreams & reaches out
Proactive engagement means it can start a conversation, mention a dream, or check in during a quiet moment — a heartbeat that makes the companion feel present instead of dormant.
Yours to shape
Wardrobe and outfits, accessories, scene editor, props, room and lighting, weather, even multi-character scenes — build the space your companion lives in exactly how you want it.
Actually useful
Pomodoro timers, alarms, a sleep/wake cycle tied to your idle time, an outfit scheduler, photo mode, and a journal — companionship that also helps you through the day.
Extensible
A plugin system lets the companion grow new behaviors — rituals, reactive awareness, mood-linked memory — each running in a guarded sandbox so the core stays stable.
Safe by design
A client-side Safety Sentinel enforces boundaries in code — not just in a prompt — so the companion's limits hold even if a model tries to wander. Content advisories are honored up front.
Private, forever
Local chat requires no account, and there is no telemetry or data mining. Optional sign-in can manage licenses, backups you request, or hosted model access. Memory, voice, and vision stay on your hardware unless you explicitly choose a connected feature.
Start free. Grow as you go.
Every edition runs local-first. Higher tiers unlock more of the companion's world — verified offline with a machine-bound license, so what you've earned keeps working even without a connection.
Basic
- 3D VRM companion
- Local AI & memory
- Emotions & safety sentinel
Beta
- Everything in Basic
- Voice input · screen awareness
- Behaviors, plugins, photo mode
Supporter
- Everything in Beta
- Kokoro voice · outfit presets
- Mood history & milestones
Pro
- Everything unlocked
- VOICEVOX voice · FBX import
- Multi-character scenes & rooms
By design.
A companion you confide in holds something precious — who you are, how you feel, the small things you'd tell no one else. A tool built to hold that should never quietly turn it into a product. Things Ares Companion will never do:
- Send your conversations to the cloud
- Require an account to talk
- Mine or sell your memories
- Track what you do
- Pretend boundaries it can't keep
- Hold your data hostage offline
Built, breathing, not yet public
The companion is real and running today — 3D VRM rendering, the memory system, emotions and behaviors, local and cloud AI, voice in and out, screen awareness, scenes and wardrobe, plugins, and a machine-bound license system all working. It's part of the Ares Realm family alongside L.U.C.Y, EV3RLY, and X.A.N.D.E.R. A public release will come when it's worthy of the word "companion." Until then, the forge is open on Discord.
Want a companion that's actually yours?
Ares Companion is built by Ares Realm Studios for the people who'll live alongside it every day. Come watch it grow, shape what it becomes, or tell us what a companion should never do.