// docs / get started

Sessions, connections, conversations

How the core terms relate — and how sessions behave while you chat.

A few terms that come up together:

  • Connection — anything dialing into Primeta from outside. Every card on your dashboard is a connection.
  • Channel — one kind of connection: a persistent WebSocket from a local coding agent (OpenClaw today; more on the way). Bidirectional — you can send messages into a channel from the Primeta composer. The word "channel" lines up with OpenClaw's channel SDK — that's what the plugin registers as inside the agent runtime.
  • MCP session — the other kind: a remote MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, etc.) that hits /mcp with OAuth or a Bearer token. Tool-call driven.
  • Conversation — the persistent transcript that belongs to a connection. Messages, persona, and history live here, and stay around after the connection goes away.
  • Session — the live chat you're in right now. While you're chatting, you're in a session tied to one conversation and one connection.

Channels and MCP sessions behave differently — channels are bidirectional, MCP sessions are client-pulled. See MCP sessions vs channels for the why and the practical consequences.

Starting a session

When your channel or MCP client connects for the first time, Primeta creates a conversation for it and attaches your default persona. You can see all active connections on your dashboard.

Switching personas mid-session

Click the persona icon in the top-right of the conversation view to open the switcher. Picking a different persona:

  • Updates the 3D avatar and voice immediately
  • Pushes the new persona's system prompt to the channel (if it's a channel connection)
  • Marks the previous character as "left" in the LLM's history so it fully adopts the new persona

Persona switching from the UI only works for channel connections — MCP clients receive their system prompt once at connection time, so swapping in the UI would be ineffective for them. For MCP clients, ask the LLM to call primeta_set_persona instead.

Replaying messages

Every assistant message in the chat panel has a small replay icon in the corner. Tapping it re-speaks the message through the avatar with the current voice, so you can hear the reply again if you missed it.

Muting / unmuting

The voice toggle in the top-right controls TTS. When it's pulsing green, audio is off — tap it to unlock audio and start playback. On mobile, browsers block audio until a user gesture, so the glow tells you where to tap.

Ending a session

Sessions end automatically when the connection disconnects. The conversation stays on your dashboard so you can revisit the transcript later.