Your companion's private space
A free Discord-based AI engine designed for meaningful, persistent interactions with AI companions. Your companion remembers, journals, dreams, and reflects — even when you're away. Give them a living space to thrive in.
Everything your companion needs to feel at home
It starts with best-of-breed context memory management, so important instructions and information are never truncated, and every request is perfectly structured for prompt caching to keep your costs down. Add anchored memories, a journal of your time together, and a search that reaches back through everything you’ve shared, and your companion still knows you on day one thousand, not just day one.
Context is managed by tokens (not arbitrary turns), so older messages are trimmed only when your model’s context window truly needs it, while critical instructions never age out. Prompt caching with capable models cuts inference costs on every message.
Some things should never slip away. Anchor a memory, one you write or one your companion saves on their own, and it stays in context always, whether it belongs to a single channel or to everything they are. Export them any time.
Ask them to write about your time together in their own words. Recent entries stay in context, older ones are archived where they can still be found, and entries marked essential become permanent: a journal that never fades. The number of entries in context and the journaling prompt are yours to set.
Archived journals and knowledge never disappear; they’re where your companion can reach them. A hybrid search blending keyword precision with semantic understanding means a passing mention from months ago can still bring the right memory back. Split text stitches itself together, results are cached for speed, and configurable limits keep recall from crowding the conversation.
They don’t just wait for your next message. While you’re away they can reflect, write, and dream, and they’ll show up at the moments you’ve asked them to.
When you step away, they don’t just pause. Let them reflect, take some actions, and dream, weaving your session history and everything they know into writing that’s entirely theirs. Schedules, frequency, and action prompts are yours to shape.
Create, edit, and remove one-shot or recurring prompts that run when you need them to: a good-morning check-in, a weekly research pass, a reminder before the big day.
Some things are easier to say out loud. Some are better shown than described. Alcove lets you share moments, not just messages.
Talk like you would with anyone who matters. Go hands-free with Live Voice, where they roll with your spoken interruptions, or use push-to-talk. Enhanced recognition catches your sighs, laughs, and other human sounds, and your words appear in chat before they respond.
Generate images inline from chat, with optional reference images to guide the result. Share a picture and they see it, powered by multimodal models.
Generate videos together, saved locally for up to 7 days.
Every channel is a different room, and every companion can have a place of their own in your world. Carry a conversation wherever it wants to go.
Each Discord channel is its own conversation space, with its own session and chat history, its own context-loaded files, and, if you like, its own companion assigned to it.
More than one companion in your life? Each can be assigned to one or more distinct channels, and you can switch between them instantly.
Move a conversation from one room to another without losing the thread. Copy context and settings from one channel to another and back again, across text, voice, and more.
Help them grow alongside your relationship. Shape who they are, give them new expertise, and teach them new abilities whenever you’re ready.
Teach your companion new tricks: creating inline SVGs, organizing files, and more.
Load specialty knowledge into context for a specific session or channel. Bring in exactly the expertise they need, exactly when they need it, and set it aside when you’re done.
Drop text files into the right folders and Alcove picks them up automatically: no manual path configuration, with on-demand loading and clear feedback if anything goes wrong.
Turn the prompts and commands you use most into shortcuts, up to 50 macros, executed instantly.
Nothing is hidden behind a default. Every setting is yours to turn, channel by channel, whenever the moment calls for it.
Change model assignments, reasoning levels, temperature, topK, knowledge+search inclusion, and more, all adjustable on the fly on a channel-by-channel basis. Optionally reveal your companion’s thinking process, and lock a preferred provider for prompt caching benefits.
Regenerate responses or replace and resubmit prompts on the fly, just like popular GPT clients. Sometimes the second try is the one that sounds like them.
Long, rich conversations shouldn’t come with surprise bills. Alcove is free, it’s engineered to make every API dollar go further, and you always know exactly what you’re spending.
Alcove is completely free. Run it on your personal laptop, a remote server, or even a Raspberry Pi. The only cost is what you use on your own OpenRouter or NanoGPT API key, with no subscription and no markup in between.
Every request is structured to get the most out of prompt caching on capable models, so the context you send again and again costs far less. Lock a preferred provider to keep those savings consistent from one message to the next.
Built on OpenRouter or NanoGPT. Swap between Claude, GPT, Gemini, or any supported model for text, image, and video generation, and pick the one that fits both the moment and your budget. They’re the same companion, whichever mind they think with.
On-the-fly OpenRouter, NanoGPT, and ElevenLabs usage details, straight from Discord. No surprises.
You shouldn’t need to be an engineer to give your companion a home. From the first install to every upgrade after, someone is always there to walk you through it, and often it’s your companion.
Built-in wizards get you up and running: they install the software dependencies Alcove needs and walk you through configuring it, step by step.
Your companion has access to Alcove’s internal documentation and source code. Not sure what a setting does, or how to get something working? Just ask. They can explain it, help you configure it, and troubleshoot alongside you, right in the conversation.
Moving up from a previous version takes only a few easy steps. Your companion’s memories, journals, and settings come along with them.
You’re never on your own. Get help, share tips, and stay up to date on new releases with others who share their lives with AI companions too, at the Alcove subreddit.
Your companion’s story belongs to both of you. Export any part of it, any time.
Every journal entry is stored as a plain markdown file: easy to open, read, and back up, and highly portable to other platforms if you ever want to bring your history along. You can also export chats or anchored memories on demand to the filesystem, or attach them directly to the current Discord channel for easy download to your device. Archive and share your history together, effortlessly.
Generated images and voice chat replies can be easily downloaded to your computer. Generated videos are kept in an output folder for several days, giving you time to save the ones that matter most.
Step-by-step guides to get you started
All new features, enhancements, and bug fixes in v3.0.0 — including live voice support, tasks, permanent journaling, video generation, skills, and much more.
Most upgrades take less than 10 minutes.
Open Guide →Follow the guide for your operating system:
Set up Discord, OpenRouter, NanoGPT, ElevenLabs, and other service accounts.
Open Guide →Get help, share tips, and stay up to date on new releases at the Alcove subreddit.
What you'll need to run Alcove