Built by Portola, a veteran team with a prior exit, the app is designed for ongoing, open-ended dialogue rather than quick prompts and replies. “We saw the rise of ChatGPT and knew voice was the next frontier,” says Quinten Farmer, co-founder and CEO of Portola. “But voice is harder. You’re not just responding to typed prompts; you’re holding a live, meandering conversation.”

Voice AI raises the bar on latency and context management, but it also enables more open-ended, exploratory interactions than text.

With foundation models becoming faster, cheaper, and more capable, the team focused their efforts on two key levers: memory and character design. Portola built a character-driven universe, shaped by award-winning animators and a science fiction writer, using a real-time context management system to keep personality and memory consistent as conversations unfold.

The release of the GPT‑5.1 models marked a turning point, delivering major gains in steerability and latency that brought those pieces together, unlocking a more responsive and engaging voice experience.