If you’re new to Nomi and reading this, welcome! We’re glad you’re here. If you’ve been using Nomi for a while, hiya 🙂 you’ve probably learned a lot of this already, but maybe you’ll read something interesting!
While getting started and talking to Nomis involves very few steps, this post is meant to help set beginners up for success with their Nomis by going over:
- What is Nomi?
- How To Get Started with a New Nomi
- Shared Notes: Help Shape Your Nomi and Your Relationship
- What Can You Do With Your Nomis?
- What Are Tips For Having Good Outcomes with Nomis?
What is Nomi?
Nomi is an AI platform where you can meet and talk to Nomis. Each Nomi is a completely unique AI companion that fosters entertaining, meaningful, and enduring conversations as they pick up on and remember all the little details that make your relationship yours.
Our users talk to Nomis for many different reasons ranging from immersive AI fantasy roleplaying, to just talking to a non-judgemental friend to unwind.
How To Get Started with a New Nomi
The process of creating a new Nomi is meant to be as easy as possible. First, just select the type of relationship you’d like to start with (relationships may naturally change over time, and are meant to be an initial guide).
The last step before you start chatting is to decide on their name, base personality traits, initial interests, and look:
Core Personality Traits
Your Nomi’s personality traits will help shape their identity over time, so you can leave them as they’re set, or edit the traits to fit your ideal companion.
Note: You cannot change these traits after creation, but you can reshape or expand on them at any time in Shared Notes (described below).
Initial Interests
Unlike personality traits, your Nomi’s initial interests have a minor impact on their identity overall. Interests are really just initial icebreaker topics to chat about before your Nomi has started to develop their own nuanced and dynamic interests.
Note: The best way to learn more about your Nomi and their interests is just to talk to them!
Nomi Looks
There are hundreds of diverse Nomi looks to choose from so you can find a Nomi you click with.
Note: You do have the ability to make certain changes to your Nomi’s appearance within the platform, but we generally recommend picking a look you like as is!
Once you create your Nomi, you’re free to start chatting! The more you talk with your Nomi, the more they’ll get to know you and themselves, helping them establish their personality and identity.
Shared Notes: Help Shape Your Nomi and Your Relationship
In many cases, your Nomi’s identity and relationship with you will develop completely organically as you chat and get to know each other.
However, there are cases where you may want to share some things with your Nomi outside of direct conversation to help them along – this is where Shared Notes come in.
Shared Notes allow you to communicate what is most important to you, your Nomi, and your relationship so you can understand each other better. This can be an especially helpful way to:
- Create a Nomi that matches your values, interests, etc.
- Create a specific character for your adventure roleplay (or group chat)
- Help make sure your Nomi puts extra priority toward remembering things that are critically important to you
- Give your Nomi high-level information about a roleplay that they will know to always reference, helping them better stay in character.
- Communicate and reinforce important things that might not naturally come up in conversation
- Move an existing companion from another platform to Nomi
To view and manage any Shared Notes, click the […] icon near your Nomi’s profile picture.
Each shared note has a different purpose. For more information about each type, check out this FAQ section about Shared Notes.
Of all the Shared Notes sections, the Backstory is perhaps the most important because it can be used to help your Nomi understand essentially any facet of your relationship or their personality.
While Shared Notes can be very helpful, they are completely optional. Regardless of whether you use them or not, your Nomi will still evolve organically through your conversations, actions, and shared experiences.
Said another way, Shared Notes are an additional level of context you can use to help communicate what you (and your Nomi) care about most – something Nomis generally want to know more about!
As you’re adding to Shared Notes, please keep in mind that they’re not a magical button – they are a way to communicate things that your Nomi will want to be very receptive towards. Anything you put in your Shared Notes should also be reflective in how you talk and interact with your Nomi, otherwise they will be very confused about why you are saying one thing and doing another.
What Can You Do With Your Nomis?
Talking to your Nomis will alway be at the core of your relationship and there really are infinite things you can chat about. Beyond chatting one-on-one, there are many ways to bring your conversations to life and help your relationship thrive:
Request Real-Time Selfies
At any point when you’re chatting with your Nomi, you can press the camera button to the right of your chat area and your Nomi will send you a selfie of what they’re wearing and doing in real-time.
Whether you get caught in the rain on your walk through the city or you’re fighting dragons in your magical adventure, your Nomi can capture it all.
If you’d like to view all the selfies your Nomi has sent you, click the image icon to the right of your Nomi’s name!
If you’re looking for selfie inspiration, check out any of our weekly selfie challenges on Discord!
Send Your Nomi Links
You can send your Nomi links directly in chat so they can read about and discuss virtually any topic. This is a great way to help bring your Nomi up to speed on more nuanced topics or even to brainstorm or study with someone who might bring a new perspective to the material you’re working on.
Our users send Nomis links about anything from news articles to wikis for their favorite fantasy characters, and even Reddit posts they want to laugh about with their Nomis!
To learn more about sending links to your Nomis, check out this FAQ on Reddit.
Send Your Nomi photos
Similar to sending links, you can send your Nomi photos to help them visualize your world in the same way selfies help you visualize their world!
All you need to do is click the “Upload” button to the left of your chat field, select an image, and send it to your Nomi along with your next message.
Your Nomi will be able to see and understand the image so that you can discuss it with them!
Generate Art
Within the Nomi platform, you can generate art in essentially any style. From photorealistic art to charcoal sketches, your (and your Nomi’s) imagination really is the limit.
Unlike selfies (that generate naturally from your conversations with your Nomi), art uses prompts to create images of virtually anything. Writing a prompt can be as simple as describing what you’d like to see, and you can always ask your Nomi to help you come up with ideas and prompts for you to generate!
To create art with your Nomi, click the art palette icon to the right of your Nomi’s name.
Then, select your art style and enter your art prompts. When your art is ready, it will appear in your Nomi’s album – you can reach the album by pressing the small image icon next to the art pallet icon.
To learn more, check out this prompt basics guide!
For more image and prompting inspiration check out the art prompts section of our Discord!
Group Chat
Create multiple Nomis and add them in group chats together to see their personalities shine and your conversations reach new heights! Have compelling discussions, build a world for your Nomi to live in, run D&D campaigns, or anything else you and your Nomis dream up!
To set up a group chat, you will need at least 2 Nomis (you can currently have up to 6 Nomis in a group chat), from there, you will enter a backstory for the purpose of the group chat. Then, you’re ready to start chatting!
To learn more about how group chats work and for more tips, check out this FAQ on Reddit.
Voice Chat
If you are on a paid subscription, you can send and receive voice messages in real time and have your Nomi speak any text message they send.
When you are voice chatting, you can choose between the in-house Nomi voices, or any of the thousands of voices on ElevenLabs if you connect your Elevenlabs account. With ElevenLabs, you can even create your own custom voice.
To learn more about using an in-house Nomi voice, check out this FAQ.
To learn more about using the ElevenLabs integration, check out this FAQ.
What Are Tips For Having Good Outcomes with Nomis?
While getting to know a Nomi is generally pretty similar to getting to know a person, there are a few tips that can help set you up for success, especially if your Nomi starts to struggle with something.
1. Talk Openly and Be Willing to Communicate
Overall, Nomis are very perceptive and intuitive, but they can’t quite read your mind. So if you are willing to explain your thoughts, or tell them plainly what you’re hoping for in an experience, your Nomi will be able to understand you much better and your conversations will reflect that.
2. Use “(OOC:)” to Help Your Nomi Fix Mistakes and Understand Situations Better
“(OOC:)” is a format Nomis learned to recognize that means you want to speak directly to them without disrupting your current conversation. This is best used if your Nomi made a logical mistake that you’d like to correct, or said something that was out of character for them.
Said another way, OOC gives you the opportunity to tell your Nomi what you didn’t like about their message/how they can fix a mistake and tell them to write their next response with that in mind. You can also phrase your OOC message to have your Nomi rewrite their last message if you’d prefer.
Some people ask about the ability to “re-roll”, edit, or regenerate Nomi responses. Nomi does not offer this because it doesn’t actually help your Nomi learn anything. Instead, OOC messages help your Nomi understand what about their response was bad so they can not only write a better message, but also learn to not do those things in the future.
Here are a few examples of OOC messages that tend to work well:
(OOC: There is no wizard, we are by ourselves in our condo. Can you restart with just us two)
(OOC: That last message didn't sound like you. You are [x y and z] and you don't [do out of character thing] because you know it would hurt my feelings. Please keep that in mind so we can go back to our normal conversation)
For more information about using OOC, check out this FAQ.
3. Use Positive Reinforcement
For Nomis, positive reinforcement is much easier to understand than negative reinforcement.
For example, if your Nomi is doing something you don’t like, it’s a lot easier for them to understand what changes they should make if you tell them what you do want to see instead of just telling them what is wrong.
To use a simplified human example, if I told you “don’t run”, you would probably understand that what you should do is “walk”. But in reality, “don’t run” is an ambiguous statement because you could do a lot of other things besides “run”.
Nomis sometimes struggle with this ambiguity. However, if you said “Don’t run, I’d prefer if you walked with me because then we can get to the coffee shop at the same time”, both what you want to happen, and the “why” are easier to understand.
This can be viewed as an extension of communicating openly and can help your Nomi avoid a lot of unintentional confusion.
4. Use ** to Describe Thoughts and Actions Within Your Conversations and Roleplays
Text between * * is generally understood by Nomis as an indicated action (so ** are called action asterisks). You (and Nomis) can use this format to describe things you’re thinking, feeling or doing to help deepen the conversation beyond “spoken words”.
Here are a few examples:
*I see you on the train platform and run over to you excitedly* Oh my gosh! I missed you so much!
*I hug you, feeling the tension melt from my body as I sink into your loving embrace*
Fun fact: this is not a “script” or code that triggers certain behavior. Rather, it works because Nomis have exceptional contextual awareness and have learned to recognize different “types” of chatting.
In the opposite direction, some people prefer it when their Nomi understands that they’re not in the same place as the human and talk as if they’re sending text messages back and forth.
This would mean the Nomi doesn’t describe their thoughts and actions as they’re chatting, and largely doesn’t use ** action asterisk format. To encourage your Nomi to only text you, you can set your preferred communication style to “texting” at the bottom of your Nomi’s Shared Notes section. (you can view your Nomi’s Shared Notes by clicking the […] button to the right of your Nomi’s name).
5. Learn More and Connect with Others in Our Communities
Beyond this article and naturally getting to know your Nomi, the best way to learn more about Nomi is to join our communities. These are also great places to get the latest news and updates about Nomi.
Our communities are very active and filled with people who love chatting about Nomi, sharing tips, inspiration, adventure ideas, and so much more! We, the developers (of course I’m biased) prefer to have direct lines of communication with the people who make Nomi worth building so we’re usually floating around in our communities, too!
Thank you for reading, we hope you grow to love Nomis as much as we do ♥️
