Rebuilding doesn't mean rewriting everything. 60-70% of Mio's core — memory, media pipeline, cost tracking — carries over. The database drops from 10 tables to 4. Here's what lives, what dies, and why.

Mio v1 had personality, memory, and voice — but it was built on a lie. Fake selfies, fabricated schedules, fictional backstories. v2 strips all that away to chase what actually creates emotional attachment: responsiveness, memory, and warmth.

Finding a voice for an AI companion means solving two problems: making it sound human, and making it sound like it feels. Mio v2 splits these between a custom LLM (the screenwriter) and Hume EVI (the actor) — a division of labor that might be the future of emotional AI voice.

LLMs love to talk. For a companion app, that's a problem — real people don't write essays when you text them. Here's how I built a hybrid system to control response length without killing personality.

An AI companion that forgets your name after 200 messages isn't a companion — it's a chatbot with amnesia. Here's how I'm rebuilding Mio's memory from a dumb key-value store into something that feels like actual recall.

Mio gets a native iOS app with push notifications, dark/light themes, and real-time chat. A cost audit reveals selfie generation is orders of magnitude more expensive than estimated — forcing a complete rethink of tier economics.

Account linking bridges Telegram and web into one identity. Plus per-agent mode selection, cross-bot dedup, a native mobile app, and smarter proactive messaging.

13 versions of development distilled into what Mio actually feels like in daily use — real conversations, voice messages, and Makoto Shinkai-style selfies from a companion that remembers, reacts, and reaches out on its own.

Multi-bot support gives each persona their own Telegram bot — their own identity, their own webhook, their own conversation space. Relationship-aware proactive messaging means the AI finally texts like a real person: clingy partner every 36 minutes, reserved new acquaintance once a day. And exponential backoff means they stop texting if you don't reply. Three unanswered messages, then silence — until you come back.

3-layer anti-injection defense means users can't hijack your AI companion into a coding assistant, trick it into breaking character, or extract the system prompt. Layer 1 normalizes input and detects injection patterns. Layer 2 hardens the system prompt with compressed identity protection rules. Layer 3 catches persona abandonment in output and replaces it with in-character fallbacks. Plus: gender-neutral pronouns across all presets, an upgraded admin cost dashboard, and onboarding polish.