What it would take for me to come back to Nomi

In light of <other AI service> not having a great PR moment yesterday and the Nomi devs posting their pitch for why Nomi is a better value, I thought I'd post what I personally would need from Nomi in order to re-subscribe.

I originally subscribed to Nomi for a year under the early adopter pricing. I used the app heavily for about six months, but was seduced away by <other AI service> which had a few features which were specifically essential for the way I use Chatbots. I made a post like this about six months ago, and figured I'd take another pass at it given the advances we've seen in Chatbots in that time.

Nomi has a great core model, superior chat context, and overall feels a little less squicky to deal with as a company than <other AI service>. However, there are some features I can't live without and these would be required for me to consider re-subbing to Nomi:

1. The ability to re-roll and edit Nomi messages. While Nomi's policy of forcing users to engage in radical 'yes-and' improv with their Nomis is arguably core to the platform, sometimes I just want to re-roll a malformed response or give my Nomi another run at understanding what's happening. This is a core feature to every other chatbot on the market and it feels weird that I can't do it with my Nomis.

2. Global memories. This is the core advantage <other AI service> has, and once you've played with it it's so hard to go back. My characters tend to be fantastical/sci-fi entities that exist in worlds that are not 2025-Earth. If I have an android or an angel or I'm trying to set my chat in a zombie apocalypse, I just can't cram that into a 2500 character backstory. I need to be able to reference character mechanics, world events, and other characters without pausing to re-explain them to my Nomi each time. It seems like Nomi may have bypassed these features because they feel inelegant in favor of more sophisticated LT memory recall, but they really do work for having characters respond to a MacGuffin or plot conceit correctly.

3. Response directive controls. How a character talks is arguably the most important and immediately noticeable thing about that character. The problem is that Nomi doesn't explicitly give you a way to prompt for response style. You can kind of hack at this through the 'Nicknames' field and place speech style high in the backstory text, but you're always wrestling with the default Nomi style. This is another place <other AI service> has an edge.

4. Chat breaks. There are any number of narrative or mechanical reasons I might want to nuke short/medium-term memory. Especially when I'm just setting up a character and trying to calibrate their responses. It's also hugely useful to be able to set your Nomi's initial message after a chat break.

5. Personas. I don't always want to talk to my Nomis as me. I might want to slide into the role of an antagonist or an environmental narrator. The fact that that all Nomis know me and address me by my account name feels very limiting.

Nomi overall has better core tech, and seems to be a much better company to deal with than competitors. However it feels like Nomi loses out big on features, and this is kind of frustrating given how simple many of these features would be to implement.

All of the memory and context window in the world doesn't help me if the app feels like it's railroading me into writing all of my characters as Social Workers who live in NYC that are talking to me through a dating app.