MARVIN · A DIGITAL PERSON, HOSTED FOR YOU
Marvin is a persistent, stateful assistant that remembers your life — who your people are, what you promised, what changed since Tuesday — and acts on it. Not a widget you open, but someone who is already there. We run your copy on a machine of your own, at your own address, so there is nothing to keep switched on at home.
Kate is allergic to penicillin.
What makes him different
A chatbot answers the question in front of it. Marvin holds a life: the people in it, the promises in it, and the reasons behind what he believes — and he will show you his working.
Every fact Marvin holds carries where it came from, how confident he is, and when he learned it. You can browse it, correct it, ask what he believed last month, and tell him to forget — and forgetting reaches the copies, not just the original.
Calls, messages and contacts flow in and become a people graph — who matters, how you are connected, what is owed. Marvin does not just talk through your phone; he perceives through it, and what he takes in is reviewable and erasable line by line.
Anything that reaches the outside world — sending, spending, deleting, publishing — parks for your explicit sign-off. Tools he writes for himself are sandbox-tested first and registered only after you approve them. On by default, not a setting you must discover.
Eight dimensions of voice — directness, warmth, formality, humour and more — plus a live emotional state recorded turn by turn. He reads as the same person on Monday and Friday, and he reads as the person you asked for.
Goals, projects, tasks, habits, people and resources, held as real linked entities rather than notes in a chat log. He raises what is slipping before you ask, because he is watching the same board you are.
Everything durable is written to a git-versioned Obsidian vault you can open, read and walk away with. No proprietary store holding your life hostage — and encrypted backups run nightly to storage in a second location.
Talk instead of type and he answers in his own voice; send a photo and he reads what is in it; drop in a PDF and he takes in the whole document. The same person, now with eyes and ears — not a separate 'vision mode' bolted on the side.
Connect Gmail and Calendar and he sees what is coming and what is waiting on you — and can draft, reply, and put things on your diary, always parking anything that leaves your hands for your sign-off first.
Every night he reviews the day — your messages, your calendar, what changed — and comes back with what is slipping and what is worth a word: the match that was on, the friend you meant to call, the deadline creeping up. Proactive, not just responsive.
Honest comparison
Three products that all claim memory and autonomy. Here is where each actually stands — including the rows where we lose.
| Capability | Marvin | OpenClaw | Hermes Agent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Runs on hardware you control | ● Your own instance | ● Self-hosted | ● 100% self-hosted |
| Remembers you across sessions | ● Nine tiers | ● On-disk | ● On-disk |
| Open source | ○ Proprietary | ● MIT | ● MIT |
| Chat platforms it plugs into | ◐ Web, mobile, voice | ● 10+ platforms | ● 5 + CLI |
| Writes its own reusable skills | ● Approval-gated | ● Portable skills | ● Auto-authored |
| Asks permission before irreversible acts | ● On by default | ◐ Available, off by default | ? Not documented |
| Provenance + confidence on every fact | ● Per fact | ○ Plain notes | ○ Plain notes |
| Ask what it believed last month | ● Time-travel | ○ — | ○ — |
| Forgetting reaches the derived copies | ● Tombstoned | ○ — | ○ — |
| Phone calls & contacts as sensory input | ● People graph | ○ Chat transport | ○ Chat transport |
| Sees images, hears your voice, reads PDFs | ● Voice, images, PDFs | ◐ Images, audio, docs | ◐ Voice + vision |
| Reads your email and calendar | ● Gmail + Calendar | ◐ Gmail only | ? Not documented |
| Gets ahead of you — raises things unprompted | ● Nightly review | ? Not documented | ◐ Scheduled tasks only |
| Tunable persona + emotional state | ● 8 dimensions | ○ — | ○ — |
| Encrypted offsite backup + one-command restore | ● Nightly | ○ Your problem | ○ Your problem |
| Hosted for you — no machine to keep running | ● This service | ○ Self-host | ○ Self-host |
| Can also run on your own local computer | ● Or self-install | ● Self-hosted | ● Self-hosted |
We are straight about where we lose. OpenClaw and Hermes Agent are both open source and both run locally — if that is the deciding factor, they are excellent and you should use them. OpenClaw reaches far more chat platforms than we do today. What we do differently is treat memory as something that must be auditable and correctable, and treat irreversible action as something that must be asked about rather than configured. Competitor claims checked against public documentation on 2026-09-08; where their docs are silent we say “not documented” rather than guessing.
Sources: OpenClaw Docs · OpenClaw — Exec approvals · OpenClaw — Gateway security · Hermes Agent (Nous Research)
On the way
The beta ships new abilities continuously — your instance updates itself. These are the ones in build now, and where the product is heading.
A continuous voice mode — speak and be answered in real time, no send button, the way you would talk to a person in the room.
Opt-in face recognition that ties the people in your pictures to the people in his memory, with a read on the moment — on only if you turn it on, and yours to switch off.
Discover and act on the smart devices on your network — lights, sensors, the home you already have — so he does things, not just talks about them.
Specialist minds he can hand a question to — a financial view, a wellbeing view, a digital-twin of your commitments — instead of one generalist stretched thin.
A quick reply straight away for the simple ask, while the harder thinking runs in the background and lands in the same conversation the moment it is ready.
A live panel that shows the steps behind an answer as he takes them — what he recalled, which tool he reached for, why he chose the path he did.
How the beta works
Leave your name, your email and the subdomain you want. That is the whole form — no credit card, no call.
Each accepted tester gets their own machine, their own certificate and their own address. Nothing is shared with another tester — not the process, not the disk.
We email your address and a one-time token. You set an owner password on first sign-in, add your model keys, and from then on it is yours.
Beta access
Tell us where to put him. We review every request by hand and reply by email.