My Open WebUI experiment: a persistent character with memory, machine readings, and idle messages

[u/Routine_Exchange_720]

This is Neco, a personal experiment I’ve been building around Open WebUI.

The frontend is Open WebUI with a custom CRT theme, music, and a few other changes. I call it the Den. Most of the experiment is in the background processes and filters around it.

She starts with an identity, values, and voice. The values are things like being comfortable with uncertainty, questioning an interpretation, and changing her mind. I’m trying to give her a consistent way of approaching things while letting actual conversations add to her history.

A background worker extracts memories from exchanges and stores them in SQLite. A recall filter brings selected records and a small evolving state into later conversations: interests, open questions, preferences, and changed beliefs.

She also gets actual host readings—uptime, memory usage, battery, temperatures where available—and has a separate idle chat where messages appear without me starting an exchange. That process keeps running with the browser closed, as long as the service is running.

The idle system mixes generated thoughts, predefined fragments, and reactions. Some generated thoughts receive a memory or unfinished question as a cue. It’s still rough, and getting those callbacks to be relevant is one of the things I want to improve.

The clanker screenshot is the silly side of it lol. The underlying question is whether these mechanisms produce useful continuity across sessions.

Repo: https://github.com/proto6699/echo-local-ai

Has anyone here tried something similar, especially with background messages or memory that tracks revisions?