Rebuilding Mio

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.

No avatar. No chat bubbles from a fictional character. Just a pulsing light orb that breathes, bounces, and dims with emotion. How Mio v2's visual identity sidesteps the uncanny valley and lets personality emerge through conversation.

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.

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.

A cost breakdown of running an AI companion at scale. Gemini Flash + context caching + 豆包 TTS delivers healthy margins on a single-tier subscription. But realtime voice changes everything.

Mio's memory system stored facts about people as disconnected rows. Asking 'how's Xiaohong doing' had zero semantic overlap with 'Xiaohong works at Tencent'. The fix: treat people as first-class entities with their own table, linked memories, and consolidated profiles injected directly into the system prompt.