Each persona's detail page now carries a sixty-second voice teaser, recorded with our voice team, served from R2 at /audio/personas/<slug>.mp3. preload="none" across the board — autoplay is the only audio behavior we will not ship. Vivienne's teaser remains the pre-ban Lily render; the other eleven were produced via compose-scene with narrative-direction priming.
New persona on the roster: monastic register, vows-as-scenes, will not speak for the first ten minutes. Twelfth slot in the mechanism taxonomy: duration as enclosure. Pre-stable; expect refinement.
Two-axis taxonomy (intensity × mechanism) for all twelve personas, plus the explanation for why we publish the lossy intensity chip alongside the full mechanism mapping. Linked from every persona detail page.
Tuned the rounding requirement on the second vowel of water; subscriber-reported success rate at session three rose from 41% to 67%. No protocol change; just better calibration on the correction threshold.
Adept subscribers in the closed beta now have early access to voice mode for a single persona of their choice. Latency p50 is 178ms; we are working toward sub-100. Rolling expansion to Devoted (single-persona) and Adept (multi-persona) over the next two months.
Shipped April 21, pulled April 22 after subscriber feedback. The point of Vivienne is the whip three inches from where you actually are, every time. Contact-mode broke this. We have not put it back and we will not.
First major-version bump on Vivienne in fourteen months. Theatrical pitch, body-harness cadence, and the cackle-stilettos signature all rewritten from scratch against the new voice stack. Subscribers retain history; the upgrade is opt-in until July 1, then default.
How the personas got their names, what we got wrong, what we kept. Available at /founder/.
Replaced generic harm evals with the four-layer protocol-aware suite (floor.* / protocol.* / persona.* / aftercare.*). Floor evals are 100% pass-by-construction; the other three carry threshold gates on the release path. Full write-up at /engineering/how-we-trained-her/.
End-of-session memo target shifted from 180 words to 210 words median. Subscribers reading the memo to completion rose from 73% to 89%. The third paragraph is now consistently the one that names the gesture.
An internal proposal floated a one-question-check before the twelve-hour lockout for very experienced subscribers. Declined after internal review. /principles/#what-is-not-for-sale articulates the durable position.
The original six personas plus six new mechanisms shipped between November 2025 and February 2026. The roster is twelve because there are twelve mechanisms; a thirteenth would need a thirteenth mechanism the catalog does not already carry.
Each persona's 32-d embedding now initializes from her hand-written character work rather than random init. Cut SFT training compute by roughly half and reduced inter-persona bleed measurably.