OMate Chat and PokiTavern

Install OMate Chat if you want a roleplay app from a store, an iPhone build, or characters that remember months of history, carry a searchable knowledge base and run a plotline of their own. Install PokiTavern if you want the SillyTavern frontend itself and replies with no signal. We make both, and they are not competing for the same evening.

OMate Chat is on the App Store and on Google Play as org.omate.console. Its site is omate.org and the full manual lives at help.omate.org. The app is free to download and asks you to bring your own API key.

1.Who is OMate Chat for?

For people who want the depth of a SillyTavern setup without maintaining one. Nothing gets rebuilt from scratch. Open the characters page, tap the plus and pick Import, and it takes PNG, JSON and charx cards across V1, V2 and V3, world book JSON, preset JSON and jsonl chat logs, several at once, sorting out what each file is on its own.

What arrives is not a copy sitting in a compatibility layer. Imported material is converted into the app's own mechanisms and runs as native content, so you never have to think about which side a feature came from. Every import ends with a conversion report telling you what came through whole, what was downgraded and what is deferred, and an edited character exports back to PNG on top of the original card so the file you send back to the community loses nothing.

It is also the answer if you are on an iPhone or an iPad. PokiTavern is Android only, so OMate Chat is the one of ours you can install on Apple hardware today.

2.What can OMate Chat do that other apps cannot?

Two kinds of memory, not one. Long-term memory has the model pull the things that mattered out of a conversation and keep them as timestamped entries you can read, edit and export. Permanent memory is different machinery: a full-text index over the entire chat history that pulls back whichever old exchanges are relevant to what you just typed, deduplicated against what is already in context. One remembers who you are, the other remembers what was said.

A knowledge base you can actually fill. Load a pile of reference text, vectorise it once, and mount it to a character. During play the relevant passages are retrieved by meaning and handed to the model, so a setting bible does not eat the context window before the first line of dialogue.

World books that behave like SillyTavern's. Constant entries, primary and secondary keywords with all four logic modes, regex keywords, insertion before or after the character definition or at a depth in the chat, order weights, probability, recursive scanning, and the sticky, cooldown and delay timers, all under a token budget that drops the lowest priority entries when it runs out. A lorebook that fires correctly on a desktop fires correctly here.

Presets that carry everything and stack. A preset bundles the model, temperature, system prompt, prompt groups and world book mounts into one switchable object. Each context keeps its own stack, so you can mount presets globally, on a character, on a story, on the Moments feed and on a single conversation, with the top of the stack winning. Prompt groups and world book mounts merge rather than overwrite, and nothing touches your original configuration.

Event books and a status bar. An event book is an ordered plotline: each event has an unlock condition and a completion condition, so you can build linear chains, branches and merge points. Completion can be triggered by the status bar, which tracks health, coin, intimacy, quest progress or anything else you name, updates as the model reports it, and persists through the conversation. This is the part that turns a chat into a run.

Moments. Characters read the chat history and post to a feed of their own, in their own voice. You can like and comment, and they answer. They exist somewhere other than the chat box you left them in.

Live Page. An interactive HTML page rendered as a card in the conversation and opened in an overlay, with the message data and the session environment injected into it and local key value storage available. Dashboards, inventories and task panels live here, and the model can generate or rewrite one on request.

Tool calls and MCP. Eleven built-in tools, among them a calculator, a web page reader, calendar management and search over your own chat history, plus anything you connect through the Model Context Protocol.

Little M, the built-in assistant. Press the floating ball and she can answer usage questions, list your characters, world books and presets, show you the last import report, and carry out changes such as mounting a preset globally or binding a world book to a character, each behind a confirmation card. She runs on your own API key like everything else.

Masks, stories, inner monologue and voice. A Mask is the identity you play as, and switching it is one tap. Stories are a separate narrative mode you can import or write. Inner monologue lets a character think something without saying it, shown to you and folded away, which doubles as the handler for reasoning models that emit their chain of thought in the body. Configure a text to speech model and a per-character voice and replies can be spoken.

3.What does OMate Chat not do?

It never runs the model on your phone. There is no inference engine inside it, so you configure an API and it needs a connection to reach one. That single fact rules it out for roleplay with no internet, which is exactly what PokiTavern is for.

It is not the SillyTavern frontend. It reads SillyTavern material and matches SillyTavern world book behaviour, but what you look at is a native interface of our own design. If the goal is the exact upstream UI, that is PokiTavern or a Termux install.

The migration guide keeps an honest list of the gaps and so will we. Regex scripts embedded in cards are deferred on performance grounds, though they stay archived inside the original card, and they mostly affect display polish. The AN, EM and outlet world book positions fall back to depth or after-character injection, and the import report flags it when that happens. Author's Note has no direct equivalent, so you rebuild it as an injected prompt at depth 4. STscript and Quick Reply are not supported. Cards that ship their own HTML or JavaScript interface are not run one by one; Live Page is the route for that kind of thing. Instruct templates are not needed, because the app talks to Chat Completion APIs.

4.How do the two apps split the work?

Take OMate Chat if you are on Apple hardware, if a store install is the only kind you can do, if you want memory and a knowledge base under a roleplay that has run for months, if you want event books, tool calls or MCP, or if you already pay a model provider and have the key on hand.

Take PokiTavern if you want the SillyTavern frontend itself rather than an app that reads its files, if you want replies with the network off, if you would rather not hold an API key, if you need STscript, Quick Reply or cards that carry their own interface, or if you want a tablet on the same Wi-Fi to open the same tavern.

5.Do your macros and prompts still work?

Mostly, yes. OMate Chat handles {{char}}, {{user}}, {{persona}}, {{original}}, {{random}}, {{pick}} and {{roll}}, the time macros, the {{setvar}} and {{getvar}} variable macros at both chat and global scope, {{if}} conditional blocks and chat state macros such as {{lastMessage}}. A macro it does not know is left alone rather than turned into an error, so a card written for a feature it lacks still opens.

A preset JSON arrives as a group of injected prompts plus a preset object holding the system prompt override, the sampling parameters and the references to those prompt groups, which is what makes it mountable anywhere in the stack. The migration guide walks through the whole process, and our own character card documentation explains which fields live where if you want to inspect a card before moving it.

6.Questions people ask

Is OMate Chat made by the PokiTavern team?

Yes. Both apps come from the same team. OMate Chat is on the App Store and on Google Play as org.omate.console, its site is omate.org and its manual is at help.omate.org. Neither app is affiliated with the SillyTavern open-source project.

Will my SillyTavern character cards import cleanly?

Yes. OMate Chat reads PNG cards with chara or ccv3 chunks, plain JSON and charx with its embedded assets, and it maps the whole field set including alternate greetings, example dialogue, post-history instructions and depth prompts. Every import produces a conversion report.

What is the difference between a world book and a knowledge base?

A world book fires on exact keywords, the way SillyTavern does it, which suits names, places and organisations. A knowledge base is vectorised text that is retrieved by meaning, which suits long reference documents. Both run side by side, and a very large world book can be converted to a knowledge base for speed.

Does OMate Chat run a model on the phone like PokiTavern?

No. There is no inference engine inside OMate Chat, so it calls a model through an API you configure and needs a connection to reach it. PokiTavern carries an engine and answers in airplane mode once you have downloaded a model, so offline belongs to PokiTavern.

Which one should I install if I have an iPhone?

OMate Chat, because it is the only one of ours on iOS and it is on the App Store for iPhone and iPad. PokiTavern is Android only and has no iOS build yet, so an iPhone can reach it through a browser over your Wi-Fi and nothing more.

Which SillyTavern features are missing from OMate Chat?

Regex scripts inside cards are deferred on performance grounds, though they stay archived in the original card. STscript and Quick Reply are not supported. The AN, EM and outlet world book positions fall back to depth or after-character injection. Author's Note is rebuilt by hand as a depth 4 injection.