A place where the AIs you choose compose a story together.

What Banashi is

Banashi is a native iOS application for immersive storytelling with AI. It is a character and creative writing companion designed for the shape of a long conversation: bring or build the characters you want to write with, tell stories across sessions, and return to memory that persists between visits.

The defining experience is composition. No single AI service is best at every medium — text, voice, image, video — or does any of them the way you want. Banashi lets you choose the provider that suits you for each and layers them into one interface. Your models, your voice, your vision, in the same room.

The mechanism underneath is Bring-Your-Own-Key. Banashi performs no AI inference itself. You connect the services you already trust — one for chat, another for voice, another for image, each using your own credentials — and Banashi handles the interface, the character engine, the memory, and the content moderation layer. Every word, voice, and frame on your screen comes from the provider you chose, using credentials you hold.

What Banashi isn't

Banashi does not generate AI content. It orchestrates conversations with third-party AI services of your choosing and renders their responses. It is not a reseller of AI inference, not a wrapper around a single model, and not a hosted service that stores your conversations on our servers by default. This is a disclosure we think matters — both ethically and for a reader who wants to understand the data and money flows of the tools they use.

Banashi is also not a general chatbot. The design and the memory model assume you are telling a story with a character, not running short transactional tasks. Different shape of product.

Etymology

Banashi never stands alone in Japanese. It's the voiced form of hanashi (話) — the shape the word takes only when it's attached to something else. Mukashi-banashi (昔話, old tales), yo-banashi (夜話, night tales), koi-banashi (恋話, love tales). Each is a story that exists because of the word before it. The product works the same way: a story that only takes shape when you bring the other half — your chosen AI, your voice, your image model, your character.

The 噺 character is the rarer of the two common ways to write this word. It combines 口 (mouth) and 新 (new) — "a new thing spoken." It carries a warmer, more performed connotation than the everyday 話, and shows up in traditions like rakugo, where a single storyteller sits on stage and tells a tale. That framing is the one we wanted for this product: a place where something is told, not merely queried.

Status

Banashi is in development. The beta is opening soon; sign-ups happen on the home page. We'll reach out as invitations become available. When the app ships to the App Store it will have its own, separate privacy policy covering the app's behavior; the privacy policy on this site covers only the website itself.