Ghostwriting, or: The Wand in the Corner
Your personal speechwriter, standing just off-stage
There is a small wand icon next to your chat input field. It does something genuinely useful, so naturally most people never notice it.
Ghostwriting lets you type a rough draft of what you want to say, tap the wand, and watch the AI rewrite it in your character's voice. It reads the recent conversation for tone, picks up the cadence, and hands you back a polished version that sounds like something your persona would actually say. You review it, tweak it if you like, and send it.
This runs as a separate AI request from your main conversation, so it never pollutes the chat flow. It's a side channel. A personal speechwriter standing just off-stage.
Context Summaries, or: How to Remember Everything
Because the best stories shouldn't end when memory runs out
Long conversations have a problem. Every message eats context space, and eventually you run out of room. The AI starts forgetting the beginning of the story, which is exactly when things were getting good.
Context summaries solve this with a clean trick. Once your message count hits a threshold, Inkstone sends the older messages to the AI in a separate request and asks for a concise summary. That summary replaces the old messages in future prompts, compressing hours of conversation into a tight paragraph while keeping your most recent messages in full detail.
The result: conversations that can run for hundreds of messages without the AI losing the thread. The early chapters become a synopsis. The recent chapters stay vivid.
Tap the options menu in any conversation and select “Chat Summary” to view or edit the summary directly. Sometimes the AI misses something important, and this is where you fix it.
The Trophy Room
Yes, Inkstone has achievements. No, it's not judging. Much.
The achievement system is a quiet record of your usage milestones, tucked away at Settings > Achievements. Each achievement has an icon (locked until you earn it), a title, a description of what you did to deserve it, and a progress bar showing how close you are to the next one. Some have multiple tiers. Some are hidden until you unlock them, because surprises are good for you.
Every new conversation is a door opened.
How many words have you given the void?
Not settling for the first draft. Taste, demonstrated.
The fine art of "actually, I meant this."
Your work, safely packaged and preserved.
Sometimes you need a clean slate. No shame in it.
How many different characters you've talked to.
Tracked by word count. For the novelists among you.
Consecutive regenerations. Perfectionism, quantified.
Coming back to the same character. Loyalty has its rewards.
If the idea of being tracked makes you uncomfortable, you can toggle achievement tracking off entirely. The trophy room will still be there if you change your mind. It's patient like that.
Data Export: Your Escape Hatch
Everything you build in Inkstone belongs to you
Full App Export
Lives at Settings > Export All Data. Creates a ZIP archive containing your characters (as PNG cards with embedded data), lorebooks (as JSON files), system prompts, personas, and settings. You can optionally include chat histories — fair warning: if you've been prolific, this will make the archive very large.
This export is a backup and reference copy. Full automated restore is a feature coming soon.
Individual Chat Export
Available from any chat's options menu under “Export Chat.” Saves a single conversation as a .jsonl file containing all messages, alternatives, thinking content, and summaries. Everything, preserved exactly.
API keys are never included in exports for security, because putting your API key in a ZIP file and emailing it to yourself would be a very specific kind of bad day.
Chat Import
The reverse of chat export
Import a .jsonl chat file into Inkstone, and it reconstructs the conversation: messages, alternatives, thinking content, summaries, all of it. File size caps at 50 MB, which is a genuinely enormous conversation. This works with files exported from Inkstone, so your conversations are portable between devices or recoverable from backups.
Debug Mode: For When Things Get Weird
The flashlight in the dark
Sometimes an API call fails and you need to see what actually happened. Debug mode is the flashlight.
Settings > Debug Settings > Enable Debug Mode
Inkstone begins logging HTTP requests. It captures headers only, leaving message bodies untouched, because the point is diagnosing connections. Your private conversations stay private.
The HTTP Log Viewer shows recent API calls with their status codes, headers, and timing. Logs live in memory only and vanish when you close the app, so nothing persists on disk.
This is a troubleshooting tool, plain and simple. When your provider returns a mysterious error, or responses suddenly stop arriving, or something feels wrong and you want evidence instead of guesses, this is where you look.
Onboarding: The First Seven Steps
About two minutes, mostly finding your API key
Welcome
Introduces the app and what it does.
Provider Selection
Choose your AI service from the supported providers.
API Configuration
Enter your key and pick a model.
Persona Setup
Create your in-character identity.
System Prompt Choice
Pick a prompt style that matches how you want the AI to write.
Prompt Configuration
Fine-tune your selection until it feels right.
Ready
The doors open. You're in.
During setup, Inkstone seeds two starter characters — Lissandra and Ibara — so you have someone to talk to immediately. First conversations shouldn't require homework.
Update Checking
Your device, your call
Inkstone can check for new versions from inkstone.uk. Toggle this at Settings > About > Check for Updates. When enabled, the app periodically checks for releases and notifies you when something new is available. Updates are never auto-installed. You decide when and whether to update, because your device is yours.
Community and Support
You're not alone in here
Under the Hood
For the technically curious
Inkstone stores all local data on your device. Your database file lives in the app's or computer's documents directory. API keys are stored separately in Android's Encrypted SharedPreferences, never in the database itself, because security is a practice, not a feature you ship once and forget about.
A few things Inkstone does not do yet. All conversations are one-on-one with a single character. Images can't be sent inside chat messages (avatars and backgrounds are a separate system). The app processes only while in the foreground. And backup exports are manual reference copies that can't be auto-restored yet. These are on the roadmap, and they're moving forward.
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