How Aion thinks
No magic. A structured belief system, confidence-weighted memory, a domain graph, and a careful privacy flow. Here's what actually happens when you talk to Aion.
Tell Aion you've been sleeping badly on Sunday nights. Six weeks later: "you've mentioned feeling off three Sundays in a row — want to talk about it?"
What is an Aion belief, actually?
Most AI "memory" is a list of past messages. Aion's memory is built out of beliefs — small structured facts with their own metadata.
What a belief carries
- Value — the fact itself, in a clean canonical form
- Confidence — how sure Aion is, updated over time
- Domain — work, health, family, social, interests, finance, learning, personal
- Last confirmed — when you last mentioned or reinforced it
- Source turn — which conversation it came from
- Contradiction history — earlier conflicting beliefs and how they resolved
What a belief is not
- Not a copy of your message
- Not a keyword tag
- Not a free-text string in a list
- Not pinned forever — it can decay, be contradicted, be corrected
- Not immutable — long-press and edit it any time
How does Aion turn a chat into structured memory?
Every conversation runs through a multi-step extraction pipeline. The output is structured beliefs — not chat transcripts.
Walk through the 6-step extraction pipeline 6
Conversation ingest
What you said, what Aion said, plus lightweight signals (time, tools used, profile context). Raw material for the extractor.
Extraction pass
The content runs through 121 extraction rules that look for name, age, location, relationships, work, health, habits, goals, values, context — the 60+ categories of self-knowledge Aion tracks.
Canonicalisation
Raw text ("my job is at Acme as a PM") is normalised into a canonical belief form so future recall isn't keyword-dependent.
Confidence & contradiction check
New beliefs are compared to existing ones. If they agree, confidence goes up. If they conflict, both are kept and flagged — Aion surfaces it with you next time.
Domain assignment
Each belief is routed to its domain (work, health, etc.), so cross-domain pattern detection can happen later.
Commit
Stored in the on-device belief store with timestamp, source, and provenance. Nothing leaves the phone during extraction.
How does Aion pick which beliefs to use on a given turn?
When you send a message, Aion doesn't load every belief into context. It finds the ones that matter for this turn.
Semantic search (meaning-first)
Aion searches memory by meaning, not keywords. Say "my partner" today and "my wife" tomorrow — both map to the same underlying belief. The retrieval doesn't care about the exact phrasing.
Confidence & recency weighting
More confident and more recently-confirmed beliefs are preferred when they're relevant. Faded beliefs still count — they're just marked as such, so Aion knows to treat them as "last I checked."
Domain scoping
If you ask a health question, Aion weights health-domain beliefs first. If the question cuts across — "is my sleep affecting work?" — both domains pull in.
Cognitive context
Selected beliefs get formatted into a concise context block and sent to your chosen AI provider along with the current message. The provider generates the reply. Aion handles what to include and what to leave out.
How does Aion notice things you didn't ask about?
A flat-list memory can only answer questions. A structured belief system with domains and timestamps can also observe.
Pattern detection
Aion watches the belief graph over time. When a pattern becomes statistically interesting — "you've mentioned feeling low three Sundays in a row" or "your sleep gets worse around sprint deadlines" — it's flagged.
In-chat check-ins
When you're talking, Aion may gently surface relevant patterns: "you mentioned this goal a month ago — still active?" Default ON. Controllable in Settings → Privacy.
Push insights
When you're not in the app, Aion can send a push notification if something worth flagging comes up. Default OFF — enable only if you want it. Settings → Privacy → Proactive insights.
Morning briefing & weekly digest
The briefing runs at your chosen time: calendar, reminders, what's new. The weekly digest is a weekend push with new, updated, and corrected beliefs — a light audit of what Aion learned this week.
Where does your data actually go?
Most "private AI" claims are hand-wavy. Here's the real flow.
On-device belief store
Every belief, chat message, reminder, journal entry, and profile setting lives in an app-sandboxed local database on your phone. Not cloud-backed. Not synced. Not accessible to other apps.
API key encryption
Your cloud AI key is encrypted with AES-256-GCM using a key protected by the Android hardware-backed keystore (AndroidKeyStore). Even with root access, the key isn't extractable in plaintext.
Cloud request flow
When Aion sends to your chosen provider, only the current request's context goes — the current message and the handful of beliefs relevant to it. The rest of your memory never leaves the device. The provider sees this single turn, not a history.
No Aion server in the loop
There is no Aion backend. No proxy. No collector. No telemetry. Your phone talks directly to your chosen AI provider. Axiom Labs never sees your tokens or your traffic.
Encrypted exports
Profile exports use PBKDF2-SHA256 at 210,000 iterations, then AES-256-GCM with a fresh random 16-byte salt and 12-byte IV per export. Your passphrase is the only way in — Axiom Labs can't decrypt your export if you lose it.
Build hardening
Public builds have debuggable=false and allowBackup=false, so adb backup can't lift your data off the device. Release logging uses a sanitised path — no personal content gets written to logs.
What happens when you send Aion a message?
What happens between you hitting Send and Aion replying.
Trace the 6 steps of a single turn 6
1 · You send
Text, voice, photo, or shared content. Goes into the composer on your phone.
2 · Context assembly
Aion picks the relevant beliefs, recent turns, and profile context. Trimmed for size.
3 · Provider call
Your phone talks directly to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google — with your key. Streaming response.
4 · Stream & speak
Text appears as it arrives. If TTS is on, speech begins before the reply finishes (Kokoro streaming).
5 · Tool calls (if any)
If the reply included a tool intent — reminder, calendar event, research — Aion runs it on-device.
6 · Extraction
New beliefs are extracted from the exchange, merged with existing memory, confidence updated, contradictions flagged. All on-device.
Can I keep my work and personal memory separate?
Your work self and your personal self aren't the same. Aion treats them that way.
How profiles work
Each profile is a self-contained memory space. Beliefs, chats, reminders, journals, and contradictions don't cross the boundary. Create "Work" and "Personal" — or "Writing", "Fitness", "Family" — whatever shapes you want.
Switching, creating, resetting
Switch from the drawer or Settings. Create a new profile with a name and a purpose. Reset active profile wipes that profile only — other profiles stay intact. It's a surgical reset, not a nuke.