Fount is an open-source AI character and chatbot framework for roleplay, AI companions and interactive storytelling. It gives persistent AI characters a home on your own machine, in the same spirit as character-card ecosystems like SillyTavern, but with its own architecture. The project has about 693 stars on GitHub and is actively developed in 2026.
Fount is built around characters as the core unit: you create or import AI personas and interact with them through chat, text adventures and role-playing scenarios. Characters can also surface as desktop pets, and the framework explores peer-to-peer chat using technologies like Nostr and Bluetooth LE, so conversations are not tied to a central hosted service. Because it is self-hosted and model-agnostic, users bring their own LLM backends and keep their stories and character data locally. The project is developed openly on GitHub with a whimsical, community-driven style, and its website introduces the character pool concept for newcomers.
The framework is aimed at users who have outgrown hosted character platforms and want importable characters, extensible behaviors and full control over which model powers each persona, without surrendering their stories to a platform’s content rules or shutdown risk.
Fount is free and open source. You run it yourself and only pay for whatever model API you connect, or nothing at all if you use a local model.
Fount is for roleplay and AI companion enthusiasts who want more ownership and flexibility than hosted character chat services offer. It also appeals to tinkerers interested in character frameworks, desktop pets and decentralized chat experiments.