Getting Started

Tzurot lets you talk to customizable AI characters in Discord — each with its own personality, voice, and long-term memory. This guide covers your first conversation through to making the bot your own. For the complete command list, see the command reference — and in Discord itself, /help getting-started shows a condensed version of this guide.

Tzurot is for adults: chatting with characters requires confirming you are 18 or older. Everything below assumes the bot is in a server with you.

Your first conversation

Characters respond when you talk to them:

• @mention a character by name anywhere the bot can see, and it replies in character. Replying to one of its messages continues the conversation.
• Browse who’s available with /character browse.
• Dedicated channels: a moderator can run /channel activate to make a character respond to every message in a channel, no mention needed (/channel deactivate turns it off).

Multiple characters can share a channel and weigh in on the same conversation.

What characters can see

Beyond your text, a character takes in what you share alongside it:

• Images — attached, pasted, or pulled from a link preview — are described and folded into the conversation, so a character can react to a picture and still remember it later.
• Stickers are described the same way, so a character responds to what the sticker actually depicts rather than just its name. Discord’s own animated sticker packs are the exception: those have no still image to look at, so their name and Discord’s own description are used instead.
• Voice messages are transcribed — see Voice.

A sticker or an image on its own is enough; you don’t need to add text.

Make your own character

• /character create starts a new character; /character edit opens its dashboard, and /character avatar set sets its face.
• /chat talks to a character directly from any channel (/random picks one for you).
• Coming from elsewhere? /character import accepts a JSON export (and /shapes import migrates shapes.inc characters), while /character export and /character template get you portable JSON back out.

Tell characters who you are

A persona is how characters see you — your name and whatever you want them to know about you. /persona edit fills yours out, /persona create makes alternates, and /persona override set presents a different persona to a specific character.

Memory

Characters remember what matters across conversations, and the memory is yours to inspect:

• /memory browse and /memory search show what a character remembers; /memory facts shows the specific facts it has learned about you — and lets you correct them.
• /memory delete and /memory purge remove memories outright.
• Fresh mode (/memory fresh) temporarily stops a character from reading its long-term memories of you — they’re kept, just not used; incognito mode (/memory incognito) stops it from writing new memories, with a retroactive forget when you turn it off.
• /history clear resets the recent conversation (with undo).

Voice

• Talk to characters: send a Discord voice message and it gets transcribed and answered like text.
• Hear them back: characters can reply with speech. /character voice set enrolls a cloned voice for a character from reference audio; /voice configures which text-to-speech and transcription providers are used and manages your cloned-voice library.
• Voice runs on self-hosted infrastructure by default — no key needed — or through Mistral / ElevenLabs with your own key.

Models and keys

Out of the box you’re on the free tier: a free AI model and self-hosted voice, no setup. When you want more:

• /settings apikey set connects your own provider key (BYOK) — your usage, your account, access to 400+ models.
• /models browse shows what’s available; /preset create builds reusable model + parameter presets, and /preset override set applies them per-character.

Your data

• /settings data export packages everything your account owns into a ZIP (link lives 24 hours).
• /settings data delete permanently erases your account after a typed confirmation.
• /notifications controls release-notes DMs — they only ever go to people who have actually used the bot, and default to breaking-change releases only.
• The privacy policy says exactly what is stored, for how long, and where it goes.

Questions or problems

/feedback goes straight to the developer, and GitHub issues work too — the whole project is open source.