Bit7 Research is the engineering side of the studio. Aria-7, the sensor mesh, the on-device runtime, the privacy architecture, the ethics charter. Twenty-six engineers and scientists, three review boards, and a habit of writing things down.
Aria-7 is a 32-billion parameter multimodal model trained from the ground up for dialogue. It does not retrieve facts. It does not browse the web. It listens, responds, and remembers what you let it remember.
We trained Aria-7 on a curated corpus of dialogue — fiction, theatre, broadcast, transcribed conversation in fourteen languages — with the explicit consent of every author or estate represented. No public scraping. The corpus is small, but it is right.
Four layers. Three of them never leave the room.
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ 04 · Voice agent (Aria-7) Tokyo · Frankfurt│ │ long-form dialogue · personality state · memory graph │ │ ▲ │ │ │ ↘ encrypted state digest │ │ │ │ ├─────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ 03 · On-device runtime Embodied SoC · M3│ │ speech-to-text · text-to-speech · personality console · memory store │ │ ▲ │ │ │ ↘ inferred presence only · "warm · listening · resting" │ │ │ │ ├─────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ 02 · Sensor fusion Local · MCU │ │ capacitive · thermal · IMU · microphone · 200 Hz inference loop │ │ ▲ │ │ │ ↘ raw sensor data — never leaves this layer │ │ │ │ ├─────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ 01 · Sensor mesh Embodied │ │ 142 — 412 capacitive points · 8 — 12 thermal zones · 12-DoF inertial │ └──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Layers 01 — 03 are physically inside the unit (or your phone, if you choose). Only Layer 04 communicates with our servers, and only over end-to-end encrypted state digests.
The Bit7 Privacy Paper is a thirty-eight page document — written once a year, signed by the company's three principals — that lays out what we collect, what we never collect, and how we will know if we ever stop telling the truth about either.
Conversations stay on-device. Sensor data is processed locally and discarded. Memory is encrypted with a key only you hold. A six-second tap, on the unit or in the app, deletes all of it.
Read the privacy paper (PDF)The Bit7 Ethics Charter is reviewed quarterly by an independent panel of three — a clinician, a philosopher, and a former privacy regulator. Their note overrides ours.
Custom commissions cannot resemble a real, identifiable person without notarised, renewable consent from that person.
All Bit7 embodiments are adults of full proportion. Our sculpting briefs and refusal protocols enforce this in every commission.
Boundaries you set are first-class objects. Our voice agents do not negotiate them, talk around them, or layer them under upsells.
Voice agents do not endorse, advertise, or insert sponsorship of any kind. Subscription is the entire revenue.
Aria-7 is fine-tuned on consented, licensed corpora. Your conversations do not improve our models, ever — even with consent. We have other ways.
We will refuse — and have refused — partnerships predicated on inferred behavioural data. The list of refusals is published quarterly.
In writing, signed by the three principals: if maintaining these commitments becomes incompatible with operating Bit7 Labs, we close the company before we change the charter. The deletion script for every user runs first.
Bit7 Research publishes when we have something we'd want to read. Most things sit in drafts for a year first.
An updated, audited account of what the company collects, retains, and discards. Written for owners; the appendix is for regulators.
Architecture, training corpus, evaluation. Bench results on warmth, latency, and silence-tolerance — the metrics that matter to us.
How we map 412 sensors to a body that flexes, warms, and ages. Joint paper with the University of Tokyo.
How users actually want to configure conversational personalities. A study of 1,400 owners across forty markets.
Why the boundary system is implemented at the model level, not the policy level. Co-authored with the ethics panel.
Three external reviewers, with binding veto. They review every product release before it leaves the atelier.
Reviews the warmth and harm dimensions of every voice update. Twenty years of practice in attachment and adult relationships.
Holds Bit7 to a coherent ethical position about the distinction between simulated and human intimacy.
Audits our data handling against EU GDPR, Japan's APPI, and California CCPA — and against our own, stricter, charter.
The Bit7 research bibliography is openly published. PDFs, model cards, audit notes, refusal logs.