Zabaware makes Ultra Hal, a conversational AI companion that predates the current wave of chatbots by a considerable margin and is still running.
The pitch is straightforward – it talks, and it learns from conversations with you, building a model of how you converse rather than resetting each session. You can talk to Hal directly in the browser without installing anything, which is a fair way to judge it before committing. A desktop assistant edition extends it beyond chat.
Set expectations against its lineage rather than against a current frontier model: this is a long-established conversational system with its own learning approach, not an LLM wrapper, and it will not match modern models on general knowledge or reasoning. What it offers is persistence and personalisation over long-term use, plus the option of a companion that runs on your own machine.
