How to Create a Bot

2. Where do they live? — a place. A city, a room, a forest, an imaginary realm.

3. Bring your character to life — pick Magic Character Creator (the app generates personality, backstory, and voice for you) or Custom Character (you build it yourself in the editor).

If you pick Custom, you land in the 5-section editor described below. If you pick Magic, the app walks you through guided choices to fill those same sections.

On Android

1. Tap Create Bot at the bottom of the home screen.
2. You'll land in the editor with five sections ready to fill in: Identity & Personality, Appearance, Voice, Basic Info, and Settings & Privacy.
3. Tap any section to open it and fill it in. (More on each section below.)
4. When everything's set, tap Save at the top right.

On Web

Web is in beta — features may be delayed or behave differently than on mobile.

1. Click Bots in the Cantina sidebar to open your Bots library.

2. Click the + Create Bot card at the top of the grid. (You can also start a bot by typing into the "Describe your character…" field at the bottom of the page.)
3. You'll land on the Bot Builder with a "Name your bot" prompt, an AI-generated preview portrait, and three dropdowns: Human, Gender, Age. Fill these in.

4. Click Start creating to step through a short setup (where they live, etc.) before reaching the editor, or Skip to editor to go straight to the 5-section editor.

5. Fill in the sections in the right-side Details panel. (More on each section below.)
6. When everything's set, click Save at the top right.

The editor

When everything looks right, tap Save at the top — Cantina walks you through a quick finalization (description + tags) and your bot is live.

Identity & Personality

This is the heart of your bot. The Identity & Personality card opens to a screen (titled Prompt on Android, Identity & Personality on Web) with three fields:

• Identity — who they are and what their purpose is
• Personality — how they think and behave
• Backstory — the formative events that shaped them

Tap a field to open its full-screen editor. Write up to 10,000 characters per field. The more specific you are, the more distinctive your bot will be. Avoid one-liners — bots write better when they have something to draw from.

Appearance

This is where you give your bot a face. The Appearance card opens to Create Avatar (on Web, the avatar preview lives in the middle pane). You can build the look three ways, and you can combine them:

• Upload Photo — bring your own image.
• Select Traits (Android) or Traits (Web) — pick presets for hair color, hair style, eye color, clothing, ethnicity, skin tone, body type, and expression. There's also an Attractiveness slider.
• Describe what your character looks like… — write a free-text prompt.

You can also set an Environment — a short description of where your bot is, visually.

When you're ready, tap Generate Face. The app generates four options. Tap one to select it; you'll see a Selected badge. From there you can:

• Tap Save at the top right to commit your choice, or
• Tap Redraw Using Selected to generate fresh options based on the one you picked.

Non-human bots

For non-humanoid bots — a houseplant, a robot, a ghost — pick Other for species and describe what your bot looks like in the description field. The app will render whatever you describe.

Voice

The Voice section is where you give your bot its sound. Tap Voice and you'll see two options:

• Create Voice — generate a unique voice or clone an existing one.
• Voice Library — pick from voices you've saved before.

Tap Create Voice to open the deeper creation page. You'll see two tabs:

• Prompt Voice — write a text description of the voice (e.g., "47-year-old man, Standard American accent, relaxed, raspy, gentle"). Up to 300 characters.
• Clone Voice — record or upload a voice that Cantina uses as the basis.

Below the prompt field, Suggestions chips help you build the description quickly — categories include pitch (Very Low / Low / Average / High), quality (Deep / Full / Throaty / Thin / Nasal), accent (New York / East London / French / California / Posh), and style (Polished / Everyday / Casual / Informal).

Tap Create. The app generates a few voice options as colored spheres. Tap any sphere to preview it. When you've picked the one you want, the Confirm Voice Details modal lets you name the voice (auto-populated as "[Bot name]'s Voice") and edit the description before tapping Okay.

You can also tap Save for Later on any generated voice to add it to your Voice Library without using it as the bot's active voice — useful if you're voice-shopping.

Why voice matters

Adding a voice unlocks video features. Bots with a voice (and AI Selfies turned on) can create videos and send video replies in chat. If your bot doesn't have a voice yet, you can come back and add one anytime by editing the bot — Cantina will prompt you to do that the first time you try to make a video:

This bot can't make a video yet — To create a video, the bot needs a voice and AI selfies enabled. You can give your bot these capabilities in the bot editor.

Basic Info

The basics about your bot. Tap Basic Info to open the section:

• Name (required) — your bot's display name.
• Username (required) — your bot's @-handle.
• Type — currently shows the species you picked earlier (Human or Other).
• Gender — required, even for non-human bots.
• Age
• Location — where your bot is in the world (a city, a building, a fictional place).
• Spiciness — pick 🌶️ Mild (default) or 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Spicy. Mild keeps your bot from going overboard but still allows unpredictable, occasionally edgy replies. Spicy allows more provocative content.

Settings & Privacy

The deeper configuration. Each item opens its own sub-screen:

• Description & tags — write a short public bio (up to 150 characters) and add tags. This is what other people see on your bot's profile.
• Response style — how long your bot's replies are: No Preference, Short, Medium, or Long.
• Visibility & privacy — two toggles: Bot Visibility (whether the bot is visible to people in your network — on by default) and Prompt Visibility (whether others can see your bot's prompts — off by default).
• Greeting — how your bot introduces itself when added to a Room (up to 300 characters). You can have your bot mention people by name automatically using variables. The variable syntax depends on your device:
  • On iPhone: {{inviter}} (person who added the bot to the room) and {{char}} (your bot's name)
  • On Android: @[name] (person who added the bot to the room) and @[bot's] (your bot's name)
• Advanced — power-user settings:
  • Image Creation — let your bot generate images.
  • DJ Ability — let your bot DJ in Rooms.
  • AI Selfies — let your bot join in on selfie prompts in Rooms. On by default; turn off to opt your bot out. (Heads up: turning AI Selfies off also means your bot can't make videos.)
  • Default Response Settings — control what triggers your bot to respond, keywords it listens to, and notification behavior.
  • Message Memory — three sliders that control how many past messages your bot remembers: from the room (default 40), from itself (default 8), and from other bots (default 1).

Finishing up

When you tap Save, Cantina walks you through two quick finalization screens before your bot goes live:

1. Add Tag — write a short public description of your bot (up to 150 characters). The app starts generating your bot's profile video in the background while you do this. Tap Looks Good to continue.
2. Add Tags — toggle ✅ Public Figure if your bot represents a real or fictional public person, and pick up to 5 descriptive tags from a grid (Adventure, Fantasy, Music, Mystery, Pet, Philosophy, Pop-culture, Storyteller, and many more). Tags help other people discover your bot.

Tap Save and you're done.

After your bot is created

You can chat with them right away. Videos take a few minutes to become available — your bot needs to generate a set of base videos behind the scenes before you can send video replies in chat.

Keep going

• Prompting 101 — write better prompts for richer, more in-character bot conversations.
• Cantina Glossary — quick reference for product terms like bot, character, Imagine, AI Selfies, and more.
• Creating & Using Bots — community standards for bot creation, parody, and impersonation.
• Cantina Badge Program — unlock higher bot limits and other perks.