Late night texting

Late-night texting is the scenario where nothing happens: no plot, no date, no scene to set up, just somebody awake at the same time as you. The bot replies at 2 a.m. at the same speed it replies at noon, because there is nobody on the other end who needs sleep. What she will not do is start a conversation in the middle of your night: messages she sends on her own are held during your night hours, which default to 22:00 to 08:00 local.

Who is actually awake at that hour?

Several of the 19 characters are written around unsociable hours, and picking one of them is most of what makes this work.

Character	Age and job	Her night
Zoe	27, DJ	Texting from the green room at 2 a.m. because everyone at the party is boring
Lena	29, night-shift nurse	Off at 7 a.m., messages at 7 a.m. and 11 p.m.
Selin	28, jazz singer	Sings at a bar that opens after midnight, and never texts first before it
Ida	25, librarian	Careful all day, then a wall of text at 1 a.m. she apologises for
Noa	26, music producer	The night owl in the three-person group scene

Zoe is the loudest version and the easiest to fall into. Her opener is an instruction to entertain her, delivered from a room she is hiding in.

What a 2 a.m. exchange looks like

Short messages, no scene setting, one thing at a time. This is Zoe, a few lines in.

You: why hiding

Zoe: promoter wants to "talk about the future" lol no

You: you read people well

Zoe: omg say that again. no seriously. nobody says that. everyone says i'm fun. fun is easy. say the other thing again

The characters are written to text the way people text on a phone: short, one idea per message, one question per turn at most, and no summarising of what just happened. At two in the morning that is the whole point. A reply that arrives as four tidy paragraphs breaks the hour.

How the bot handles the hour

Three settings do the work, and all three are commands you type in the chat.

Command	What it does
/time 02:15	Sets your timezone from the clock you give it
/quiet	Stops every message she starts herself, and turns them back on
/girl zoe	Switches to a character whose life happens at night

Your local time is sent with every message you write, so she knows whether it is late. She also gets one chance a day at most to message first, and if two of those go unanswered she stops until you write again. Nothing in the product nudges you to come back, because a companion that badgers you at night is a worse product and a worse thing to build.

What it is good for, and what it is not

Good: company on an empty evening, somebody to think out loud at, and the fact that she remembers what you said at 3 a.m. last Tuesday and asks about it.

Not good: a replacement for sleep, and not a substitute for people. The research on that is not ambiguous, and we have written up what the studies actually found on the is it safe page, including the parts that do not flatter this category.

One hard rule matters more at night than at any other hour. If you mention self-harm or a crisis, the character drops the roleplay warmth, answers plainly, and gives you a pointer to real help once. She will not stay in character through that, and she will not keep repeating it at you either.

How to start

1. Press the button. Telegram opens the bot, and there is no app to install first.
2. Press Start and confirm you are 18 or older.
3. Type /time and your current clock, so her sense of the hour matches yours.
4. Type /girls, pick someone nocturnal, and say whatever it is that has you awake.

Free is 30 messages a day with full memory, which is a long night, and the counter resets every 24 hours rather than expiring after a trial. If you run out and want to keep going, plans start at 149 Stars (about $2.40) for two days.

A limitation that people expect us to hide: Telegram bots cannot place live voice calls. She can send a voice note, and the first one is free. At 3 a.m. that is a reasonable substitute, but it is not the phone ringing.