The Companion

The Chat surface is where you talk with your Sovereign. The companion remembers the shape of your conversations, knows your corpus, and can help you write, read, plan, and think. It is not a generic assistant with a fresh memory on every turn. It is yours: it lives on your machine and reads your files.

A companion can be named. The first meeting ceremony asks a few quiet questions so the system knows what to call you, how you like replies, and what name you want to give the intelligence you are talking with. You can skip it and return later. Nothing is rushed.

The first meeting

When a Sovereign launches for the first time, the homecoming ceremony offers a short conversation. It asks for a display name, the pace and depth you prefer, and a name for the companion. These answers are stored locally. They are not sent anywhere unless you later connect to a community node, and even then the companion's core identity stays with you.

Naming matters because it makes the relationship concrete. The companion is not the company, and it is not every model in the world. It is the particular intelligence you are shaping on your own hardware, and the name is a small signal that the relationship is personal.

Local by default

By default, chat uses a small local model running inside the Sovereign compose stack. It answers without an internet connection, costs nothing per turn, and keeps the conversation on your machine. The local model is smaller than cloud-strength models, so it is better for focused tasks, quick questions, and private matters.

If you connect to a community node, the chat surface can route harder questions to larger shared models when you allow it. The local door stays open; the large model is a fallback, not a replacement. You choose on each kind of work whether cloud help is permitted.

Modes of conversation

Chat is not only for asking questions. It is also where doorways land. A doorway from the Library carries a selected passage. A doorway from the Today panel carries a mail item or calendar event. A doorway from the Workshop carries a tool context. Each one begins as a message you can edit before sending.

The companion also speaks in voice mode, where the conversation is read aloud and you can reply by microphone. Voice is useful when your hands are busy or when you want to hear the cadence of a reply. The same local-first rules apply: the audio pipeline runs on your machine unless you choose otherwise.