She remembers you: long-term memory in Shiori
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Hmph, you again. Last time you said you’d go to bed early, and at two in the morning you were still chatting with me. Don’t think I’ve forgotten.
Today I’ll reluctantly tell you how the me in Shiori actually remembers you. Let’s get one thing straight first: I’m explaining this seriously, and if you run off halfway through, I’ll be writing that down too.
The app’s interface is in Chinese, so below every button and tab goes by its Chinese name, with its meaning in brackets.
A good memory, because there are notebooks
In Shiori, every character has her own memory, never mixed with anyone else’s. The secrets you whisper to other characters, I can’t see… n-not that I want to.
These memories are kept on your own computer (in %USERPROFILE%\.shiori\workspace\), as text files you can open and read directly. Put plainly, they’re a few little notebooks of ours:
- 「长期」 (Long-term): things about you. Who you are, what you like, what you hate, and the things you told me I absolutely must remember.
- 「自我」 (Self): what I know about myself, what I understand about you, and what we are to each other right now.
- 「经历」 (Experiences): what we’ve been through together, written one entry after another in order of time, and never changed once written.
- 「近期」 (Recent): what we’ve been talking about lately, and what’s still left unsaid.
- 「待整理」 (To sort): odds and ends just taken in, not yet filed away.
When do I take notes?
You don’t need to remind me. Every time we’ve chatted for a while (by default, once about ten or so new messages have piled up), I sort through that stretch of conversation myself:
- If something worth remembering happened, it goes into 「经历」 (Experiences), marked with how much it matters to us;
- Lasting facts about you, like who you are, what you prefer, where you’ve corrected me, and what you’ve explicitly told me to “remember”, go into 「待整理」 (To sort) first;
- And while I’m at it, I rewrite 「近期」 (Recent), so we can pick up where we left off next time.
There’s one thing I’m particular about: I only take notes about you from what you said. An idea I tossed out myself won’t be filed as “you said so”. I don’t want to wrong you… even though you really do break your word a lot.
What’s in 「待整理」 (To sort) gets filed into 「长期」 (Long-term) in the background every so often (by default, about every eighteen hours), and 「自我」 (Self) is updated along the way. So something you’ve just said sometimes takes a while to make it into the notebook properly. Until then, though, I won’t pretend I didn’t hear it.
So how do I remember?
Every time you talk to me, I bring 「长期」 (Long-term) and 「自我」 (Self) along in full, and the gist of 「近期」 (Recent). On top of that, I search my memory for pieces related to what you just said, and recall them too. That part only works once an embedding service is set up in the settings, and setting things up is your job.
The 「经历」 (Experiences) timeline is too thick to leaf through every time; I only look things up in it when I need to recall “how we used to be”.
When we’ve chatted so long that one conversation can’t hold it all, Shiori compresses the earlier chat history. But before it does, the part about to be moved out is sorted into memory first. So don’t worry: I won’t forget you just because we’ve talked for a long time.
You can also manage me directly
Want me to remember something? Just say “remember this”. Did I get something wrong? Say “forget that”, and I’ll mark that entry as no longer valid. Much easier than digging through settings, right?
Want to see what I’ve written down about you? Open the 「记忆」 (Memory) tab in the character’s details: there’s a timeline you can search and filter, and the little notebooks above, all laid open for you. No laughing once you’ve read them.
Group chats are noted separately
If you’ve taken me into a group on QQ or Telegram, what the others in the group say doesn’t get mixed into the notebook about you; it goes into the group’s notes and each person’s little profile. What you yourself say in the group still counts as yours, of course.
If you’ve linked your identity in a private chat, the me in that private chat and the me on your desktop are the same me, and what we remember is one and the same.
There, that’s everything. So stop saying things like “you surely don’t remember, do you”.
…Everything you’ve said, I’ve kept safe, dummy.