Desktop Pets, Create Your Own Character & Smarter Chat - May 16, 2026
🐾 Desktop Pets
There's a brand-new Pets tab in Browse, packed with hundreds of built-in pets and growing — ready to drop onto your desktop. Pets are tiny companions that hang out alongside (or instead of) your usual character — a chibi cat, a wiggling slime, a little ghost — taking up much less screen space than a full character so they fit anywhere without getting in the way.
- Throw them around. Pets follow your cursor when dragged, and when you let go they keep moving — flick one across the screen and it'll glide to a stop with proper inertia. We tuned the friction so it feels alive instead of slippery or stuck.
- Smooth little animations. Pets crossfade between motions cleanly, so even a small set of clips reads as a real little creature.
- Browse and try. Open Browse → Pets to see the full lineup. Click one and it pops onto your desktop right away.
✨ Create Your Own Pet
Pets aren't just something you pick from a library — you can make your own with one prompt. Open the pet editor, click "Generate Animations", describe what you want (a grumpy corgi, a tiny dragon, your OC), and we will draw the whole animation set for you: idle, walking, sitting, the works. A minute later you've got a brand-new little creature flopping around your desktop. No drawing skills, no sprite sheets, no rigging.
🪄 Create Your Own Character
Characters are no longer locked to Live2D, VRM, or 3D models. Anything you can put together in story mode is now a real character you can chat with and drop onto your desktop — custom uploads, AI-generated images, you name it.
A photo of your cat? Your girlfriend? A doodle you drew at lunch? A clip from your favorite anime? It can all become a fully working character — speaking with TTS, reacting in chat, sitting on your desktop. You can also just ask the Creative Buddy to generate one for you — describe the character you want and it'll fire off image generation and turn the result into a ready-to-use character. The wall between "art you found" and "companion you can talk to" is basically gone, and the possibilities open up in a pretty wild way.
🧠 Smarter Characters
Characters got a meaningful brain upgrade — they can now do more things.
- Reminders. Tell them "remind me to take the laundry out in 40 minutes" or "ping me at 9pm to call mom" and they'll pop up at the right time. Ask "what reminders do I have?" and they'll list everything pending. Quitting the app with active reminders gives you a heads-up so you don't miss them by accident.
- Time, location & weather. Ask "what time is it?", "where am I?", or "is it going to rain?" and they'll just check. Weather works for your current location or anywhere in the world.
- Faster, more reliable search & links. Web search and "open this link for me" have been rewritten under the hood — noticeably quicker and a lot less likely to flake out mid-conversation.
🐛 Bug Fixes & Polish
Plenty of behind-the-scenes improvements this round — smoother chat in long conversations, more reliable image generation, better recovery when something goes wrong, and lots of small polish across the editor and browse views.