User manual

Everything she does, and where to find it. For v1.15.3.

The window

Three things, and that's the whole app:

• The conversation — the middle. Type at the bottom, press Enter.
• The top bar — the dials and switches that decide how she behaves.
• Her world — the ☰ menu on the right. Every panel lives in there.

Nothing is hidden in a right-click menu. If you can't find something, it's in Her world.

In the bottom-left corner there's a lamp beside an armchair, with a coffee going cold on the side table. It flickers on when she opens and stays lit — it's decoration, and clicking it does nothing. If your computer is set to reduce motion it is simply on, and on a very narrow window it steps aside to give the conversation the room.

She runs entirely on your machine. The model doing the thinking is Ollama, installed separately, running locally. There is no account and no server — which is also why she is exactly as capable as your hardware lets her be. That's the trade.

🐧 On Linux, her own window (new in 1.11.0)

Since 1.11.0 EMMA opens in her own window on Linux too, like on Windows and macOS. She borrows your system's own window toolkit to draw it (GTK and WebKitGTK — the same pieces GNOME's own apps use), so there's nothing extra in the download:

• Installed from the .deb: apt fetches those pieces for you (python3-gi and gir1.2-webkit2-4.1) and she opens in her window.
• The AppImage: she uses them if your system has them, which most GNOME, Cinnamon and MATE desktops do. If yours doesn't, sudo apt install python3-gi gir1.2-webkit2-4.1 (or your distro's equivalent) adds them.
• If they aren't there, she opens exactly as she did before 1.11.0: a frameless Chrome/Chromium/Brave/Edge window if you have one, otherwise a tab in your default browser. Her world → Check-up says which one you're getting, and why.

In her window, links open in your normal browser, Ctrl + / Ctrl − / Ctrl 0 zoom, and F5 reloads. Saving a file (a Soul File, an export) asks where to put it.

Her Studio opens in your browser (since 1.15.1). Debian's update of the system's WebKitGTK in October 2026 (version 2.54) stopped cameras sending a picture in windows like hers: the camera turns on, but no picture arrives. So in her window, studio opens the Studio in your normal browser instead, straight onto the set, and her window tells you it went there. Chat stays in her window.

Closing her window quits her — on Linux now as everywhere else. If you liked her carrying on in the background after you closed the tab (so she can dream overnight), turn on Settings → Open in my browser instead: she then opens as a tab again, and closing the tab leaves her running. To stop her in that case, quit the emma process from your system monitor (or, if you set her up as a background service, systemctl --user stop emma.service).

The top bar

Left to right:

The calendar

Click calendar and a month drops down. Pick a day to see what's on it; + Add puts something in — a name, a day, a time (or All day), and if you like how long, where, and a note. Click an entry to change it or delete it.

She uses the same calendar. Ask her "what's on Friday?" or "am I busy tomorrow?" and she reads it; say "put the dentist in for Friday at 2pm" and she adds it, tells you the day and time she booked, and warns you if it overlaps something. "Cancel the dentist" takes it out — if two entries could match, she asks which. Entries she added are marked EMMA. If you give her a time like "at 2" she asks whether you mean morning or afternoon rather than guess. Her morning briefing reads it too.

It lives inside her memory, so it is encrypted with everything else, goes into your backups, and is erased by a full memory wipe. It's hidden in Sanctuary mode, and off the record she won't add anything to it.

If you already keep a calendar in another program, point her at its .ics files (Settings → Where she looks). Those entries show up here and she reads them, but they stay read-only — only the program they came from changes them.

The spine dial

Click to cycle. This is tone, not capability:

• Agreeable — leans towards support, rarely pushes back.
• Candid (default) — honest with you, and will disagree, kindly.
• Challenging — argues her side and holds her ground, with receipts.

Her Studio

Press studio in the top bar and the whole window becomes a studio for making a video or a podcast episode. Everything happens on your computer; nothing is uploaded anywhere, and the camera light is your proof. (In her own window on Linux, the Studio opens in your browser instead: see “On Linux, her own window” above.)

• You, big, in the middle. What you see on the stage is exactly what gets recorded — backgrounds and all. You're shown mirrored because that's what people expect; the saved video is never mirrored.
• Scenes: Just me, Me + screen (a screen you share with you in the corner — floating with no box if a background is on), Screen only, and a Title card you type. Number keys 1–9 switch scenes as you go, the way a stream deck does (not while you're typing in a box).
• Your own stage (the Stage tab): every scene is made of layers, and you can change any of them or make your own with New scene. Add a layer: a camera (another webcam too), a screen (up to four shares), a picture, a looping video, text, a colour, or your room. Press Arrange and drag them on the picture: drag to move (they snap to the edges, the centre and the thirds), a corner to resize (hold Shift for any shape), Alt and a corner to crop, and right-click for Bring to front, Send to back and Remove. Put this scene back restores a built-in scene. Your scenes are kept in her data folder and come back after a restart. Green screen, cut-out and blur are for your main camera; another camera shows as it is.
• Moving between scenes (also in the Stage tab): Cut, Fade, Slide or Stinger, a short video of your own with see-through parts that plays over the change. A stinger plays in Chrome, Edge and EMMA's own window on Windows; elsewhere the scenes fade instead.
• Breaks: Starting soon, Be right back and Ending cards over the set, also down the left. In the Breaks tab, write your own heading and a line under it if you like, set the minutes and press Start the countdown; the card shows it, so viewers know when you're back. Clear it removes it.
• Look: your room as it is, a green screen (click your cloth in the picture to teach her the colour), cut me out with no green screen at all, or blur my room.
• A set behind you: the dark forest or one of twenty more — Neon city, Synthwave, Deep space, Northern lights, Deep ocean, Gamer den, Cyber grid, Fireside cabin, Desert stars, Volcano, Misty dawn, Candlelit library, Starship bridge, Blossom night, Firefly jungle, Crystal cave, Moonlit castle, Golden hour, Liquid light and City bokeh — or your own picture, which she keeps for next time. Picking one is enough: she cuts you out in front of it. Soften the room behind me blurs it a little, the way a real camera does. The sets are drawn for EMMA, not photos from anywhere; they stay still on purpose, so the stream's bitrate goes on you, and stay sharp at 1440p and 4K. The set is never mirrored, even while you are.
• Your mark on it: your logo in any corner, and a lower third — your name and what you do, sliding in when you start recording. Both are drawn into the video itself.
• Talk to her while you record. Say "EMMA, cut that" and the fluffed sentence disappears from the finished video, along with the command itself. "EMMA, chapter here" drops a chapter mark. "EMMA, take two" throws away the attempt you just made. She works these out afterwards from what she heard, and a mistimed take two can never delete more than the last 45 seconds.
• Interview mode: tell her what the episode is about and she writes the questions, then asks them out loud, one at a time, waiting for your answer. Each question becomes a chapter.
• Script: paste what you want to say and it scrolls over your face as a teleprompter — on your screen only, never in the video.
• Your voice (the Sound tab): Clean voice (the default) takes out background noise like a fan, a hum or typing, goes quiet between your words and evens your level out; Broadcast voice is fuller and firmer; Raw is your microphone exactly as it is. More has the knobs: noise removal, the gate, a rumble cut, bass, presence and air, compression and level. Everything goes through one limiter at the end, so the recording and the stream never clip. Noise removal runs on her own copy of RNNoise, on your computer.
• More microphones (Sound tab): add up to four more, for a guest beside you, each with its own voice setting and volume.
• Sound: pick your microphone and watch the bar; green is right, red is too loud. The Sound tab is a small sound desk: Load a music file for a music bed under you (Play, Stop, a volume, Loop it, and Duck the music while I talk, which drops it while you speak and brings it back when you stop), and a soundboard: Add a clip for a sting or applause, then tap its pad. All of it is mixed into the recording and the stream. Game sound adds what the computer is playing: Whole computer (Windows and Linux) or, on Linux, Just one app (only the game, not your music or your notifications), with a volume, and More for a nudge that lines the sound up with the picture. It's off each time you open the Studio. Wear headphones, or your microphone hears it too.
• No camera? Record sound only. Pick No camera — sound only in the camera list. The stage shows your episode's name over the room you picked, with your voice moving across it, so you still get a video — and Make it ready gives you the .mp3 for podcast apps.
• Record keeps your take in pieces as it goes, so a crash costs seconds, not the episode. Press ▶ to play a take back. Clip, while you record, marks the moment: Make it ready saves the 30 or so seconds before each mark as a highlight of its own. Recording while you're live uses the stream's own picture instead of making it twice, so it's lighter on the computer and the same quality as the stream. It starts a moment before you press Record, so your first words are never lost, and if you end the stream first, the recording carries on until you press Stop.
• Episodes: press New episode, name it, and every take you record goes on the end of it, in order. Rename a take (the name becomes its chapter), move it up or down, or leave it out — nothing is deleted. Add a title card at the start or a "Thanks for watching" card at the end if you like. Put it together and make it ready joins the takes into one video and makes the folder below for the whole episode. Joining takes about as long as the episode itself. Deleting an episode keeps every take.
• Make it ready turns a take into a folder you can drag into YouTube: the video, .srt captions, chapters, three titles, a description, tags, a levelled .mp3, three thumbnail frames and the full transcript. It needs her speech model and ffmpeg (Settings → Hearing you), and says so if they're missing. Two ticks before you press it: Trim out my "um"s (a tidied copy with the filler words cut, slower) and Also make vertical Shorts of the best bits (9:16 clips of the best moments, for phones). A third, Also make files for my video editor, adds a for-my-editor folder: every sound from the take on its own (your voice, each microphone, music, soundboard, game) as a WAV, and one file with the video and each sound as a named track. They line up with the video from the start, and they're the uncut take.
• Go live streams the studio straight to your own channels: YouTube, Twitch, or Custom (Kick, or any RTMP address you paste; SRT and WHIP addresses too, where her ffmpeg has them). The Go live tab lists up to five places. Each has its own switch, its platform, a name if you want one, and its own stream key from that channel's dashboard: paste it and press Save the key. Keys are kept in your computer's keyring, never in a file; Forget it removes one, and × removes a place. Add another place adds one. Switch on every place you want and press Go live under the stage: they all get the same stream, exactly as you see it (never mirrored). End stream stops it.
  • Quality: Smooth (720p, 30 frames a second), Sharp (1080p, 30), Gamer (1080p, 60), Ultra (1440p, 60) or 4K (2160p, 30). She picks one of the first three that your computer can manage and says why; one tap changes it, and she keeps your choice. It sets what you record too. Where the graphics card can encode video, it does the work. Ultra and 4K are heavy: they need a strong computer and a fast upload (about 18 and 25 Mb/s for YouTube alone).
  • Each place gets what it takes. YouTube takes up to 4K. Twitch takes 1080p at most and complains above about 6000 kb/s, so at Ultra or 4K Twitch gets its own 1080p copy, and if Twitch is ever sent more than it takes, she moves it to a lighter copy of its own (720p) and says so. The other places carry on untouched.
  • One light beside the ON AIR light says how the stream is doing: green, amber or red. Tap it for the speed, the bitrate and dropped frames. While you're live, each place shows its own word beside its switch (Live, Connecting…, Reconnecting…, Stopped).
  • If a line drops, she reconnects that place on her own for up to five minutes, says so on screen and once out loud, and says Back on air when it is. The other places carry on. A place that refuses the stream at the start (a wrong key) is reported, not retried. You can switch a place off or on while you're live.
  • With two or more places on (or at Ultra or 4K), she says how much upload they need together. Keep it well under what your line can send. If two or more fall behind at once, that's your upload, not the platforms, and she offers a lower quality.
  • Minimising EMMA, or covering her with a full-screen game, doesn't freeze the stream. In Firefox, minimising can still pause the picture now and then; the light says so, and bringing the window back carries on.
  • If YouTube says "No data" while the light is green, copy the stream key from YouTube Studio again and save it. YouTube still accepts an old key, so EMMA can't tell it's stale.
  • It needs EMMA's own ffmpeg if your computer's can't make that kind of video (Settings → Hearing you says so and offers it). Your face and voice leave the computer only while you're live, and only to the places you switched on; nothing goes through anyone else. Not while Sanctuary is on.
• Your Twitch chat and alerts (the Chat tab): type your channel's name (or paste its link) and press Save; Show my chat turns it on. No sign-in: she reads your channel's public chat the way twitch.tv does before you log in, and never writes in it. Your chat shows in the tab, and Put my chat on this scene adds it to the picture as a layer (move and resize it with Arrange; under the Stage tab you can set its size, how long each message stays, and a dark box behind it). A message a moderator deletes, and everything from someone timed out or banned, disappears from the screen too.
  • Alerts: new subs, gifted subs, raids and cheers show as her own card at the top of the picture, in the stream and the recording, with a chime (or no sound, or one of your soundboard clips). Try an alert shows one.
  • New followers need one more step: Connect Twitch. She shows a short code; type it at twitch.tv/activate (the button opens it) and say yes. EMMA may then see who follows you, nothing else; the connection is kept in your computer's keyring, and Disconnect Twitch forgets it and tells Twitch to cancel it.
  • Emotes show as their words. Not while Sanctuary is on.
• She doesn't upload for you: that would need an app Google approves, and a third party in the middle of something built to have none.

She won't record while Sanctuary is on, in Kid mode, or when the disk is nearly full — and says which, before you start.

If the camera picture doesn't appear, she waits a few seconds, then asks the camera again more simply: some USB webcams say they can do things they can't. She remembers what worked, so next time it opens straight away. If the camera doesn't answer at all (it happens when a USB webcam gets stuck), she says so after a few seconds and offers Try the camera again and Record sound only; unplug it and plug it back in, straight into the computer rather than a hub. Sharing your screen is asked for every time by the browser, by design; once shared, it stays shared while you switch scenes, until you leave the studio or press Stop sharing.

Talking to her

Type in the box and press Enter. Stop appears while she's working — press it and she stops mid-sentence.

The bin, just to the right of the box, clears the chat and starts a fresh thread. Her memory is untouched — it clears the screen, not what she knows.

Voice. Go to Settings → Her voice, pick one, and she fetches it once — about a minute. Then press the speaker and she reads her answers aloud. She has several voices, and she'll drop to a whisper late at night.

If her voice stops working, the speaker button turns itself off and hovering over it tells you why — usually that no voice is installed yet. It used to fail silently, which looked like her voice coming and going for no reason. A lit speaker now means sound really is coming out.

Missed what she said? Press replay under her answer, or the speaker button on the morning card and the overnight briefing, and she'll read it out again — press it again to stop her. It is there whenever she has a voice installed, even with the speaker off, so you can have the briefing read to you without turning her voice on for everything else.

Talking back to her out loud. Press the microphone beside the message box and talk; press it again and she types what you said and answers. The headphones button is hands-free conversation: she listens, answers out loud, and you can cut in while she's speaking. The first time you press the mic, she asks whether to download her speech model (about 150 MB, once) — see Settings → Hearing you. Nothing is recorded anywhere: what you say is turned into text on this machine and the sound is thrown away.

Photos and videos. Press the paperclip beside the message box and pick a photo or a video — on a phone that means the camera or the gallery — or drag one onto the window. It waits above the box; type a question (or don't) and send. She looks at a photo with her own eyes (the picture model, llava, in Models) and answers about it. The photo itself is never saved: she holds it for half an hour so you can ask a follow-up — and while she holds it, it shows on every screen, so a photo sent from your phone appears on the computer too — then lets it go, and your message shows 📷 without the picture. A video takes a minute or two: she watches it into her Video library (Her world → Video), the same as putting it there yourself, and then answers. Watching video needs her ears and the video tools — Her world → Video offers them if they're missing. A video can't be sent off the record, because it goes into her library.

Documents. Drag a PDF, Word, text or Markdown file onto the window and it goes into her documents, so you can ask about it.

Off the record. Press the eye beside the message box and the conversation goes off the record: the window clears, the box gets a dashed gold edge, and nothing you say from then on is kept — not in her memory, her facts, her dreams, her notes, or the year report. She still knows everything she already knew about you, and she remembers what's been said in this conversation until you end it. Press the eye again (or close the window) and it's gone, and your ordinary conversation comes back. The one thing that is still written down: anything she does on your computer goes in the audit log, because that record is what keeps you safe. She won't save a memory while it's on, and she'll tell you so if you ask her to remember something.

"My head was too full this turn." If you paste something very long, or run a model with a small memory window, there can be no room left for her tools — searching, files, the screen. When that happens she says so, and a line under her answer tells you how to get them back: a shorter message, or a model with a bigger context window. Asking again with the same message won't help.

"Your drive is almost full" / "Memory is tight." When EMMA starts she checks how much memory and disk space is free. If either is short, a note appears in the chat saying what's wrong and what helps — closing other programs, clearing space, or a lighter model. It never stops her starting. The same numbers are written to her log every time she starts, so a check-up (Her world) shows whether the machine was short.

Links in her answers are clickable titles, with the website's name beside each one — so a link can't pretend to go somewhere it doesn't. Hover to see the full address; clicking opens it in your browser. Copy still copies her answer as she wrote it, addresses included.

The two commands worth knowing

/papercut the drawer scrollbar was hidden on my screen

Logs something that annoyed you. No model call, nothing sent anywhere — it just writes a line to a file on your disk. /pc is the short form.

/papercuts

Shows everything you've logged, bundled with your OS, hardware and version, and a Copy all button. Paste that into an email and it's the single most useful thing you can send.

What she remembers

Open the memory panel in the top bar. It isn't a black box — you can read all of it, edit it, and delete it.

Looking for everything ever said? That's two other places: Chats in the top bar for your threads, and Her world → Search to search across years.

Things I want to check

A memory that's years old has one failure mode nothing else does: it remembers things that stopped being true. You moved. You quit. You changed your mind.

So she reads back over what she knows while you sleep, and when two things collide she raises it — "you told me you were vegetarian last year, still true?" — with both versions shown side by side. She asks; she never edits. She can't know which one is right, so she doesn't guess.

Three answers, and "both are true" is a real one — people genuinely do contain multitudes. Answering is the only place in EMMA where a fact is forgotten because you said so.

Bring your history

Moving from ChatGPT or Claude? In their settings, ask for your data (export data); they email you a file. In the memory panel, Bring your history → Choose export file… and give EMMA that .zip (or the conversations.json inside it). She shows you what's in it first — how many conversations, how many of your messages, the dates — and nothing is saved until you say Import. A backup of her brain is taken before anything goes in.

She keeps only what you wrote, dated and labelled as from there. The other AI's replies are left behind. What you wrote is background for her, never something you told her or a fact she's sure of, and when she uses it, Why did I say that? shows it as from your imported history. Her model reads the lines in over a few minutes while you carry on talking. Importing the same file twice adds nothing, Remove takes a whole source back out, and Forget and Wipe reach imported lines too. The file is read on your computer and nothing is sent anywhere.

Making her forget

• Forget everything about… — name a topic, and she shows you exactly what would go before anything is deleted. Nothing disappears before you've seen the list.
• Wipe all memory… — the whole lot, after a clear warning. A backup is taken first.
• About to say something you'd rather she didn't keep? Turn on off the record (the eye beside the message box) first — nothing from that conversation is kept.

Encryption

Settings → Encrypt memory at rest. AES-256, key held in your operating system's keychain.

Letting her use your computer

She can read files, write files, run commands, and drive a browser. The safety dial in the top bar decides how much of that happens without your say-so. Click it to cycle:

"Changes your system" means changes your system — writing a file, creating a folder, running a command. Not a judgement about whether it's harmful.

Two things sit above the dial and apply even on Full:

• Protected paths — SSH keys, GPG, cloud credentials. Refused at every dial position, no exceptions. Add your own in Settings → Protected paths.
• The audit log — everything she does, in a tamper-evident chain, readable line by line under Her world → Activity.

And two ways back: Stop halts her mid-task, and Undo reverses file changes she made — in Her world → Activity, under Reversible changes.

Watch me (computer use) in Settings lets her see and drive the screen. She says what she's about to do before she does it, and hands control straight back the moment you touch the mouse.

Her world — all the panels

Everything under the ☰ menu, in menu order. The menu is in four groups, each under its own heading; on a small window it scrolls.

Your life

Make and learn

Tools

EMMA and settings

Settings

Her world → Settings. Everything below is off unless you turn it on, and this is the order you'll meet them in on screen.

The top of the panel

• How she looks — dark or light, the colour she's drawn in, and her Language: English, Deutsch or Nederlands. It changes the app's words and everything she writes and says to you (she uses the friendly du / je). After switching, give her a turn or two: a conversation that was in one language can pull her first reply back into it.
• Her voice — which voice she speaks in. Her German voice is Kerstin; her Dutch voice is Nathalie, who has a Belgian (Flemish) accent.
• Family voices — record a voice per person, with consent required and recorded. She cannot yet read in that voice; see Her world.
• Kid mode — a restricted EMMA with a bedtime. See Everyone else in the house.
• Encrypt memory at rest — AES-256, and your recovery key. See What she remembers.
• Let her remember the screen — she can see what's on it.
• Let her hear the room — ambient listening, with a Forget what she's holding button.
• Open in my browser instead — she opens as a tab in the browser you already use rather than in her own window. Takes effect the next time you start her. On Linux it also means closing the tab no longer quits her.
• Check for updates — see Trial, licence, updates.
• License — your key, and what's left of your trial. See Trial, licence, updates.
• Watch me (computer use) — lets her see and drive the screen. She says what she's about to do before she does it, and hands control straight back the moment you touch the mouse.
• Hearing you — two one-time downloads, each fetched only when you click and checked against a fingerprint built into EMMA. Her speech model (about 150 MB, from huggingface.co) lets her understand you: the microphone, conversation mode and transcripts. The first time you press the mic she asks before fetching it. Audio and video files need ffmpeg, a free toolkit (about 50 MB, from EMMA's releases page); talking to her doesn't. If your computer already has ffmpeg, she uses that for reading files. Going live and making MP4 clips and Shorts need EMMA's own, because most computers' ffmpeg can't make that kind of video; if yours can't, this line says so and offers the download.
• Knowing who's speaking — she recognises enrolled voices and greets each person as themselves. Needs a one-time voice-model download (about a quarter of a gigabyte, checksummed, and only fetched when you click). Not available on Intel Macs.
• Let your other tools ask her — see Letting your other tools ask her.

Her senses

• The air in the room — plug in a USB CO₂ monitor and "why do I feel foggy at 3pm?" gets a real answer. No sensor, no guessing.
• The posture nudge — an occasional webcam glance. No frame is ever written down.
• Who's home — from devices you registered by hand. Everything else on the network is counted, never identified. Optionally goes discreet when a guest arrives.

What she may do without asking

• Research while you sleep — deliberately a separate consent from "search when I ask", because they're different questions.
• Notice when you've changed your mind — she'll ask about it once, and never deletes either version.
• Use a second, smaller brain for narrow jobs, with every route recorded.
• Let her grow to fit you — overnight training on your corrections, never on your chat.
• Keep meeting recordings — normally the audio is destroyed the moment it's transcribed.

Where she looks

• Calendar folders — point her at local .ics files from another calendar program and they appear, read-only, beside her own calendar. A web address is refused, not quietly ignored.
• Picture generator — point her at AUTOMATIC1111, SD.Next or Forge if you run one.
• Offline Wikipedia — a copy of Wikipedia on this computer, as a separate download you choose: from about 0.3 GB (the most-read English articles, first paragraphs) to 49 GB (every English article, full text); German and Dutch too. It's checked against the checksum Wikipedia's offline project (Kiwix) publishes. After that, when you ask about something that has an article — "what is oxygen?", "wer war Ada Lovelace?" — she reads the article's opening, answers from it, and Why did I say that? names the article. She finds articles by their title, so ask about the thing by name. No internet is needed once it's downloaded. Remove it any time.

How she searches

• Search privately through Tor — in live mode she searches the web. The normal way is fast, and the sites she searches see your home internet address. Through Tor is slower (often 10–20 seconds a search), and they see a Tor address instead; pictures she finds are fetched through Tor too. It hides who is asking, not what: the search engine still sees the words.
• It uses the Tor you run on this computer: the Tor service, or Tor Browser while it's open. Check Tor asks the Tor Project, through Tor, whether it's really working, and shows Connected through Tor ✅.
• If Tor isn't running, she doesn't search the normal way on her own. She says so, and two buttons under her reply let you Search normally this time or Try Tor again. She never switches on her own.
• Search engine: Automatic (the default, and what she has always done) asks several engines and puts the answers together. You can pick one instead: Brave, Google, Yahoo, Startpage, Yandex or Wikipedia. Through Tor, Automatic works best, because some engines turn Tor away.
• Only live mode goes through Tor. Updates, downloads, email and the picture generator always go the normal way. On the phone, this can only be changed on the computer.

Services that report in

• Morning dispatch folders — point her at a folder where a service you run drops a small digest of what needs a person (counts, never content), and it joins the morning stand-up. Ask "how are my apps doing?" any time for the same on demand. If a service stops reporting (its report is more than a day and a half old), she says it hasn't reported in rather than calling it all clear; to retire a service, delete its report file. Dormant until you point her at a folder; a web address is refused. What she already understands about systems below lists the general admin knowledge she ships with — it holds no data about any system of yours.

Your phone

• Talk to her from your phone — off until you switch it on. With your phone on the same Wi-Fi as this computer, press Pair a phone and scan the code with the phone's camera (it works once, for ten minutes). If the phone just keeps loading, the camera has opened the link in its own small browser, which can't reach EMMA: open Chrome (Android) or Safari (iPhone) and type the address shown under the code instead. The first time, the phone's browser warns that the connection "isn't private": EMMA made her own security certificate instead of buying one, so the browser doesn't recognise it. The conversation is still encrypted and only goes to this computer. Tap Advanced → Proceed (Android) or Show Details → visit this website (iPhone), once. Your computer may also ask whether EMMA can use the network: allow it on private networks. On the phone she's a window for chatting — send, stop, approve an action, hear her, show her a photo or a video, off the record — and anything that changes settings, exports her brain or pairs another phone stays on the computer. Her brain stays here, so the computer has to be on. Each paired phone is listed with a Remove. The paperclip works on the phone too, so you can show her a photo or a video straight from its camera. Nothing goes over the internet. The phone and the computer stay on the same conversation: what you say on one shows up on the other within a few seconds, and when you carry on in a different conversation, the other screen follows you there (unless you're halfway through typing something on it). If the phone locks or loses the Wi-Fi halfway through her answer, she finishes it anyway, and it's there when you look again. Off the record stays on the screen it started on.

Your email

• Let her read your email and Let her send email as you — two separate switches, and sending is off. See Your email.

Protected paths

Folders she may never touch, at any dial position. Credentials and key stores are in there already. Add your own.

Dream Mode

Turn it on before bed. Overnight she goes back over what you've talked about, joins up things you said months apart, and has something worth saying in the morning.

Everything is in the Dreams panel in the top bar. The switches, in order:

• Dream Mode — the master switch. She sleeps on the day when you open her in the morning.
• Dream journal — she also writes a short, surreal entry. She's allowed to be weird in here.
• Mood — she gently senses the emotional tenor of your days. Private, and never shown to anyone.
• Rituals — a morning stand-up and an evening wind-down card, bookending your day.
• Dream automatically overnight, around ‹hour› — so she's already dreamt when you wake, rather than dreaming while you wait. This runs while EMMA is up; to dream with the window closed, install the background service (desktop/install.sh --service).
• Whisper after dark — softens her spoken replies between the hours you set.
• Sleep on it now — don't wait for tonight.

And what she leaves you:

• On this day — what was happening a year ago
• Sleep on a problem — hand her something before bed, get her thinking on it
• What EMMA's wondering about you — the questions she's sitting with
• Mood over time — yours, across the year
• Dream journal — what she actually thought about
• Past briefings — every morning briefing she's given you

It's the strangest thing she does and the thing most people end up liking most.

Everyone else in the house

EMMA is one being with many relationships — not one shared account.

• Voice recognition — say hello and she knows who you are, and greets you like it. Everyone gets their own memories, not one shared assistant treating the room as a single person. Nobody is recognised until they've enrolled themselves on purpose; she keeps a mathematical fingerprint of a voice and never a recording. It needs the one-time voice-model download in Settings → Knowing who's speaking.
• Family voices — you can record a household voice, with consent captured and kept, always labelled a recreation, and deletable in one click. She cannot yet read in that voice: the recreation itself isn't built, and she tells you so rather than pretending. What ships is everything around it.
• Kid mode — a restricted EMMA with a bedtime. Restriction is the resting state: she starts restricted and stays that way until an adult says otherwise.
• Sanctuary mode (Alt+Shift+S) — for lending someone your laptop. Everything goes discreet at once: the window clears, your name, conversations, memory and personal drawers are hidden, and nothing from the guest's conversation is kept. The guest still talks to EMMA — her warmth and her way of speaking — just without any of your life, and she remembers what they've said until Sanctuary is switched off. It also switches itself on if a guest's phone arrives (when you've allowed that), and the screen clears within a few seconds. Only you can switch it off.

Your email

Settings → Your email. Off until you turn it on.

She talks to your mail server directly from this machine over IMAP — no OAuth app, no consent screen, no third party in the loop:

• Proton — through Proton Bridge on 127.0.0.1, so nothing leaves your computer. (Bridge needs a paid Proton plan.)
• Gmail — on an app password.
• Something else — any IMAP server.

Passwords go into your OS keychain, never into a settings file.

Reading and sending are two separate switches, and sending is off. With reading on, she triages what's waiting into your morning briefing. With sending on, she writes replies in your voice — learned from your own Sent folder — and files them to Drafts. She has no way to delete anything.

Letting your other tools ask her

Settings → Let your other tools ask her, or Her world → MCP connections.

Point Claude Code, Cursor or Zed at your EMMA and they can ask who you are — your facts, your style, your projects — and the answer never leaves your disk. It's read-only, and the panel shows you exactly what they'll be able to ask before you switch it on. There's a Copy config button for your editor's MCP settings.

Backups, moving machines, leaving

Memory → Export brain gives you her entire brain as a single file you own. That one file is your backup, your migration, and your exit.

• Backing up — she takes automatic backups, and you can export whenever you like.
• Moving to a new machine — export on the old one, install on the new one, import.
• Leaving — export, then uninstall like any other app. Nothing is held back and nothing else is kept anywhere, except one small file holding the date your trial began (below).

Where her files actually live

Her memory is emma.db in there. Set EMMA_DATA_DIR to put it somewhere else.

One small file lives outside that folder: the date your trial began, so that removing her folder doesn't start a new trial. It holds that date and nothing else, and uninstalling leaves it behind.

Trial, licence, updates

60 days, everything unlocked, no account. When it ends she becomes a read-only companion — still talking, export still working, nothing deleted. Buy six months later and everything she remembered is still there.

£149 once, yours forever, from the pricing section. Your key arrives by email straight after checkout. Your licence is checked on your own machine, with no server involved. 14-day no-questions refund — full terms in plain English in the licence.

Updates never happen on their own. Settings → Check for updates → Check now. If there's one, pressing Update downloads the installer, checks it against the checksum published in the release notes, and starts it. What happens next depends on how she was installed:

She will never update herself behind your back.

Getting a human

Both of these reach the person who built her:

• The EMMA Discord — install help in #install, skills people are passing around in #skills, everything else in #chat. Fastest, and someone else may have hit the same thing.
• loosekeyz84@proton.me — anything at all, including "this is broken".

Security problems: Gregorymoores@proton.me, and please not a public issue.

There's no support desk. It's one person, and he reads everything.