Does an AI companion message you when you are not there?

The short version: a web page cannot reach you. For anything to arrive while you are not looking at it, the service needs an address — an email, a push permission, or a phone number. If it never asked for one, nothing will arrive, whatever the character says.

The three ways anything can reach you

That is the whole list. A character in a chat window has no other route to you, so the question “will it message me?” is really the question “what address does it have?”

What “I was waiting for you” means

That line is written at the moment you open the page, not before it. Nothing was running while you were away, nothing was thinking about you, and there is no backlog of unsent messages. The sentence is a piece of character writing generated from the time on the clock, which is a reasonable thing for a character to say and a bad thing to believe. The test takes one message: ask what it did in the hours you were gone, twice, some messages apart. Two different plausible answers mean the answer is being invented each time, which is exactly what it is.

Delays are a design choice

Some services reply instantly every time; some pause; some tell you the character is at work. A pause is a timetable in the software, not an absence. It is worth knowing which you are looking at, because instant replies at four in the morning tell you there is no schedule behind the character at all, whatever the description promised. Neither approach is dishonest — a stated timetable is a feature. A timetable presented as a life is not.

What happens when you close the tab

Two possibilities, and they have opposite consequences. If the conversation lives on the server, you can come back tomorrow, or on another device, and it is still there. If it lives in the browser tab, closing it loses everything, and no server ever had it. Test it in a minute: open the same service in a private window, or on your phone. If the conversation is there, it is stored; if it is empty, it was never anywhere but that tab.

Why messages that arrive unprompted exist at all

When a service does message first, that is a retention system: it costs the operator money to generate and send, and it is there to bring you back. Worth asking two things before it starts. Whether those messages count against whatever allowance you pay for, and whether you can switch them off without losing the rest of the service. Both answers should be findable without writing to anybody.

How to test all of it in five minutes

What to check before you pay

Where this site stands

Everything above applies to any service, including this one, so here are the same answers for the companion on this site, in the same terms.

What it is, and what it is not

Other questions answered on this site

Questions

Write to hello@toolkitlabs.org. It is a real inbox on this domain and the messages are read.