How LORAX works

She lives on a clock, in her own city

Every character has a home city and a time zone, and the app keeps her day in that time zone. She has a sleep window (a night owl in Leipzig goes down around six and wakes past noon; a bakery apprentice in Lyon is asleep by nine), working hours, and stretches where she’s out and not looking at her phone. Whether she’s awake right now is decided from that schedule, not from whether you opened the app.

Two things follow. If you write while she’s asleep, the message is delivered but not read until she wakes; once in a while she’ll surface at night, send something short and half-awake, and go back under. And she knows the real time where you are too, along with the real weather in both cities, so “it’s pouring here” is true when she says it.

She texts first

After you sign up you don’t write to anyone. Within a couple of minutes, someone writes to you. From then on, conversations keep starting on her side: about something that happened in her day, at an hour that fits her life. Each character has a small daily budget of these starts, so it never turns into spam.

If you don’t answer, she tries again, then again, and after the third time she stops until you write. She never asks why you went quiet. A filter checks every outgoing message for that kind of guilt trip, and if one slips through, the whole message is dropped rather than sent. Details in She texts first.

Nothing about the timing is fixed

The delay before a reply is built from four parts: the time to notice, the time to think, the time to type, and the gap before the next bubble. Each part is drawn from a distribution, and typing speed comes from the character’s own profile. The same message sent twice gets two different rhythms. Sometimes she starts typing, stops, and comes back to it. Long thoughts arrive as one to four short bubbles, the way people text.

There is a hard ceiling. In an active conversation you never wait more than twelve minutes for a reply, and in the first days of a new relationship replies come faster than they will later.

Memory has three layers

The first layer is who you are: name, city, job, the things you’ve said about yourself. The second is what happened between you, kept as episodes. The third is the detail inside those episodes, which she goes back for only when it fits the conversation. That’s why she remembers that you had an interview three weeks ago before she remembers the name of the studio. If a search comes back empty, she doesn’t make something up; she says she doesn’t remember.

Memory is private to each pair. What you tell one character, another doesn’t know. Characters can hear that something happened between you and a friend of theirs, never what was said. More in She remembers.

Her mood is a curve, not a switch

Mood has two dimensions, roughly how good she feels and how keyed up she is, and it decays on its own over a few hours. If something in the conversation lands badly, she writes shorter, cooler and later for a while, and then it passes. There’s no button to reset it. The app shows you where she is on a page called Between Us, along with a line of what she’s thinking.

Group chats keep going when you leave

A group holds you and up to four characters. They talk to each other about their day, about each other, and about you. Leave the app and the room keeps moving, at a pace that slows the longer you’re gone and stops after a few days. You don’t create the group: after a few days of talking to two people separately, one of them asks whether to bring the other in.

The cast knows each other. There are 25 written relationships between characters, friendships and grudges included, and things said in a group can come back to you privately. More in Group chats.

Live streams are how you meet people

You go live the way you would on Instagram: the room fills, the chat scrolls, gifts and follows arrive. The crowd is drawn from a pool of 9,004 identities and more than 16,600 lines in 22 languages, with a share of the lines written live for that moment. Say a viewer’s name out loud and that viewer answers you. If your mic is off, nobody asks you to say something; they know they can’t hear you.

Viewer counts go down as well as up. Go quiet for twenty seconds and the room thins; start talking and it comes back. Characters you haven’t met drop in, watch, and some of them message you hours later. That message is one of the three ways someone new enters your life here. More in Live streams.

A closed cast, three ways to meet

There are more than 250 characters, women and men, in 30 countries. Two are open when you start. The rest you meet one of three ways: someone watched your stream and wrote to you; someone you already know mentioned a friend, and the friend wrote to you; or you used credits to meet someone. In all three, the first message comes from her. There’s no browsing, no “unlock this profile”. The cast page shows some of them.

You can also create a character: describe her or start from reference photos, and she joins the cast with a schedule and a memory like everyone else.

Photos come from where she is right now

Ask what she’s up to and a photo may follow: the room she’s in, the clothes she’s wearing that day. Ask for another one that afternoon and she hasn’t changed her outfit. Photos arrive locked and cost credits to open; if the photo can’t be generated properly, the credits come back. Photos are rationed by real gates, so it’s never a stream of them. More in The photos she sends.

The other direction works too. Send her a photo, a voice note or a short video and she reacts to what’s actually in it: the mug on the desk, the way you laughed halfway through a sentence. She doesn’t summarize; she picks one thing.

It moves at its own pace

Closeness isn’t a setting. The app reads how you behave over days and lets the relationship move through stages slowly, unevenly, and only if it’s mutual. Nothing is guaranteed: the odds are capped below certain, and the stage never moves backward. She can refuse. She can lose interest if you disappear. More in How it progresses.

What it can’t do

• No voice calls and no video calls. Characters don’t send voice notes or videos; you can send them and she understands them.
• iPhone only. No Android, no chatting in a browser.
• Every character is fictional and AI-generated. She’ll stay in character, but the sign-up screen and this site say plainly what she is.
• Talking is free with a daily allowance. Photos, meeting someone new and creating a character cost credits. Prices are on screen before anything is spent, and nobody in the app will ask you for money. Pricing.

In detail

• Create your own character in LORAX: Build a character in LORAX two ways: a quick two-step path, or a detailed six-step one, with or without reference photos. She joins the cast with her own schedule and memory, and texts you first.
• Group chats that run without you: A LORAX group holds you and up to four characters who talk to each other about their day, each other, and you. You don't create it: one of them proposes it, once.
• It moves at its own pace: how closeness works in LORAX: Closeness in LORAX moves through three stages: acquaintance, flirting, close. Progress is read from your behavior over active days, rolled once a day, capped at 80 percent, and it never reverses.
• Live streams in LORAX: you go live, they show up: You are the one who goes live. The room fills from a pool of 9,004 crowd identities in 22 languages, the viewer count falls when you go quiet, and characters who watched may write later.
• She remembers: how memory works in LORAX: Memory in LORAX runs in three layers: facts about you, episodes of what happened, and the detail she goes back for. Empty search, and she says she doesn't remember.
• The photos she sends, and the ones you send: Photos in LORAX are generated for that character, in the room she's in and the clothes she has on that day. They arrive locked, cost credits to open, and real gates keep them occasional.
• She texts first: how LORAX starts the conversation: In LORAX the first message comes from her. After sign-up it lands in about 80 seconds, and every character gets three conversation starts a day.

Questions