Small Intelligences
Active development

Cirilo

A character-first iPhone companion that listens to everyday stories, remembers approved details, reacts, speaks, and draws locally.

Category: Small Intelligences
Platform: iPhone · iOS 18+
Status: Active development

What if you wanted a creature to spend time with instead of another assistant?

Face-first conversation, reviewed local memory, optional voice, procedural expression, bounded generation, and deterministic safety keep the intelligence inside one defined character.

User value

Talk to a familiar character, not another assistant.

Cirilo is a low-pressure place for daily stories, moods, minor victories, and small disasters.

Share without creating a task

Tell Cirilo what happened and receive a characterful response without turning every moment into advice or productivity.

Choose what becomes memory

Ask Cirilo to remember something, review the distilled proposal, and approve, edit, or forget the local record.

Keep the relationship bounded

Use a companion that excludes romance, therapy, professional authority, dependency tactics, and invisible background memory.

Cirilo's tentative Premium Pixel face in an idle state on a dark iPhone screen. — **Tentative visual direction**A debug review artifact, not an approved final identity or complete interface capture.

Features

One companion loop, several forms of response.

Conversation, memory, voice, expression, and drawing all remain subordinate to Cirilo's character and safety rules.

01
Face-first conversation
Keep the procedural creature at the center while typed conversation and the latest reply stay compact and secondary.
02
Reviewed spoken input
Start listening deliberately, inspect the transcript, then copy or submit it through the same guarded conversation path.
03
Bounded local responses
Use Apple Foundation Models on compatible devices and a deliberately limited local fallback when the full path is unavailable.
04
Explicit local memory
Persist only approved, active, low-risk structured records. Ordinary messages and full transcripts do not become memory automatically.
05
Procedural drawings
Respond to explicit safe drawing commands with validated SwiftUI primitives that remain inside the current session.
06
Optional voice and reactions
Speak eligible safe replies and move the procedural face through bounded expression states with Reduce Motion support.

How it works

A story enters one guarded character system.

Flexible generation never bypasses classification, memory policy, or the companion's defined boundaries.

01
Tell Cirilo what happened
Type a message or deliberately submit a reviewed speech transcript.
02
Classify the input
Apply deterministic intent, safety, relationship, privacy, and age-policy routes before choosing a response path.
03
Handle explicit commands
Route remember and draw requests to their own local review and rendering systems.
04
Retrieve approved context
Supply only a small eligible set of reviewed local memories to ordinary low-risk conversation.
05
Generate or fall back
Use Apple's on-device model when supported or a limited local response when it is not.
06
Shape the final response
Run character and safety guards before showing text, changing the face, or speaking an eligible reply.

Product demos

A procedural face with bounded expression states.

Tentative Premium Pixel state study

10 sec

Current visual study

Expression follows product state.

Debug artifacts show one tentative visual candidate. The public default and full interface media remain unapproved.

Listening

A restrained state marks deliberate spoken input without implying that the app is always monitoring.

Remembering

A warmer reaction can accompany the explicit reviewed-memory flow rather than hidden capture.

Safety serious

High-stakes handling keeps expression calm while deterministic safety takes priority.

Product concept

The intelligence serves the character.

Cirilo combines modest signals of continuity without presenting itself as a general answer engine, therapist, or romantic partner.

Presence before productivity

Everyday stories can receive attention and personality without being converted into plans, metrics, or advice.

Memory with permission

Continuity comes from reviewed structured facts, not a hidden archive of conversation or automatic profiling.

Companionship without dependency

Deterministic relationship boundaries prevent romance, exclusivity, authority, and language designed to make the user reliant on the character.

Architecture

Local state machines around bounded generation.

Deterministic policy chooses context, commands, safety routes, persistence, and outputs before and after any model supplies candidate language.

01Typed input or submitted transcript
02Deterministic classification and safety
03Memory or drawing command handling
04Eligible approved memory context
05On-device model or limited fallback
06Response guards, face, text, and voice

Session data stays transient

Conversation turns, transcripts, audio, drawings, face state, diagnostics, and entitlement state remain in memory.

Only reviewed memory persists

UserDefaults stores settings and onboarding state. An app-private JSON file stores approved low-risk structured memories.

Safety is deterministic

High-stakes, romantic, sexual, dependency, privacy, credential, and other restricted routes can block memory, voice, drawing, and expressive reactions.

No custom service layer

The current app has no account, application backend, cloud model provider, analytics implementation, cloud sync, or camera access.

Technology

A native companion with explicit local boundaries.

Application

Swift
SwiftUI
iPhone
iOS 18+

Conversation

Foundation Models on iOS 26+
Limited local fallback
Deterministic safety
Response guards

Voice

Speech
AVFoundation
Reviewed transcript submission
Text Only mode

Memory

App-private JSON
UserDefaults
Reviewed structured records
Deterministic retrieval

Expression and commerce

SwiftUI procedural rendering
Local drawing primitives
StoreKit 2
XCTest

Development

The companion systems are integrated.

Conversation, reviewed memory, speech, voice, face reactions, procedural drawing, safety, onboarding, commerce foundations, and privacy controls exist. Real-device quality, accessibility, StoreKit, visual approval, privacy export, and distribution remain incomplete.

Stage: Active development
Automated suite: 1,143 passed
Manual ledger: 867 pending
Distribution: Not yet public

Implemented

Local onboarding, face-first typed conversation, visible thinking state, and in-memory session turns
Deterministic classification and safety, limited fallback, conditional Apple Foundation Models, and post-generation guards
User-initiated speech recognition, transcript review, explicit submission, speech synthesis, and Text Only mode
Explicit memory proposals, review, approval, local persistence, editing, forgetting, filtered retrieval, and bounded context
Five procedural face candidates, bounded reactions, Reduce Motion behavior, and explicit-command procedural drawings
Settings-accessed StoreKit paths plus privacy inventory and confirmation-based settings, onboarding, and memory controls

Before release

Complete privacy export, validate Apple on-device generation, speech, voice, memory, safety, StoreKit, accessibility, and companion feel on real devices, approve the visual direction, then finish TestFlight and App Store work.

Cirilo lab notes

The project, over time.

Notes about the thinking, architecture, development, and decisions behind this work.

Talk to a familiar character, not another assistant.

Share without creating a task

Choose what becomes memory

Keep the relationship bounded

One companion loop, several forms of response.

Face-first conversation

Reviewed spoken input

Bounded local responses

Explicit local memory

Procedural drawings

Optional voice and reactions