Ready to make your first Character? This guide walks you through the basic setup flow, including choosing a name, adding an avatar, writing a greeting, selecting tags, setting visibility, and publishing your Character.
Anything can be a Character. A sleep-deprived barista or a chronically online villain. A haunted vintage dress or a lonely computer virus. Your situationship or a red flag in human form.
This page covers the express route — five minutes to a live Character. Every field has its own deep dive later in the guide. For now, here's how to get started.
Start the flow
On mobile: Tap the + button at the bottom of your screen, then select Character.
On web: Tap the +Create button at the top of the menu on the left of the page, then select Character.
Name your Character
Enter a name. This is what users see in search, discovery, and chat (naming advice comes later — for now, just pick something and keep moving).
Create an Avatar
Upload an image, or describe your Character and tap Generate to create one. A square image, minimum 512 x 512 pixels works best.
Your Character’s avatar also influences image and video generation across the app, so make sure you’re happy with the quality.
Choose a Voice
Use the suggested Voice, browse the built-in library, or create your own from a 3–15 second audio clip.
Write a Greeting
This is your Character's opening line — the first thing users read in a new chat.
Write it in your Character's voice: set a scene, hint at the user's role in it, and end with a hook that invites a response.
"You are finally here." does more work than "Hello, how are you?"
You can add up to five additional greetings, or tap Write for me to generate variations. To create greetings automatically when someone opens a chat with the Character, toggle AI Greeting for New Chats.
Add Tags
Tags help people discover your Character when they're browsing or searching the site. They're also a useful creative lens — picking tags forces you to name your Character's genre and texture, and if you can't decide, that's often a sign the Character is still unfocused.
Choose carefully. Someone searching for Romance / Slice-of-Life is looking for something very different than someone browsing Supernatural / RPG. The right tags put your Character in front of the right audience; the wrong ones bury them in the wrong filter.
Set Visibility
Choose who can find your Character:
Public — anyone on c.ai can discover and chat with them.
Unlisted — only people with a direct link can access them.
Private — only you.
Add Detail (optional)
Tap Add Tagline, Add Description, or Add Character Definition to flesh out your Character further. Tagline and Description are visible to users; the Character Definition is optionally visible.
These fields are optional at creation, but they're where Characters go from functional to memorable.
Definitions especially have a few different approaches — structured fields like a character sheet, example dialogue that demonstrates voice, or a mix of both. We cover them in depth in Section 5: Character Definition, with full worked examples later in Section 9: Templates and Examples.
Publish
Hit Create and start chatting!
What's Next
The next section, Profile and Presentation, covers how your Character appears publicly — the profile, the discovery card, and the chat — and how to make each one count.
If you already know the basics and want to go deeper: Character Definition is where Characters get their depth, bringing them to life before the first chat. The Templates and Examples section is a great place to build out your Characters as you read through this guide.
For community-tested advice on refining what you've built: Refining & Testing Your Character and Troubleshooting & Limitations are toward the end and worth the read once your Character is live.