Custom Instructions: The Setting That Personalizes Every Conversation
Of all InnerHaven’s personalization tools, custom instructions are the quietest — a single text field most people never open. They are also, by a comfortable margin, the most powerful. A custom instruction is guidance you write once and your companion reads before every single reply, shaping tone, focus, and the small habits that make a conversation feel like yours. Two sentences can change every chat that follows. This is what the feature is, where it sits among InnerHaven’s other personalization tools, and why it does so much work for so little effort.
What Custom Instructions Actually Are
Custom instructions are a freeform text field available on every companion, across every tier — Free, Starter, and Unlimited. Whatever you write there becomes part of the context your companion sees before generating each response. They are not commands the companion has to execute; they are a gentle briefing that steers how it shows up for you. The instructions do not replace a companion’s role — a Best Friend with custom instructions is still a Best Friend — they layer on top of it, adding the specific voice you want inside the emotional frame the role provides.
Character limits scale with your subscription, giving you room to be more specific as you settle into the platform. But the effect is non-linear: even a short, well-chosen instruction can change the texture of every conversation that follows. The longest custom instruction we have seen do real work was nine words.
Always-on, never intrusive
Because instructions are read silently before each reply, you never see them mentioned in conversation unless you bring them up. The companion just behaves the way you described — warmer or sharper, longer or shorter, gentler with one topic or firmer with another — without the experience feeling rule-bound.
What Belongs in Your Instructions
Three categories cover almost every useful instruction. Mixing all three in a few short lines tends to outperform a single long paragraph.
Tone & Style
How you want the companion to speak. “Be warm but concise.” “Use gentle humor when the mood feels heavy.” “Skip clinical language — talk like a close friend.”
Stable Life Context
Things that do not change conversation to conversation. “I work night shifts; 3pm is my morning.” “I have two kids, ages 4 and 7.” “I am in the middle of a career change.”
Boundaries
What to skip or how to handle sensitive moments. “Do not bring up my ex unless I do first.” “If I seem upset, ask one question, then give me space.”
For a deeper walk-through with example phrasings and patterns, see our guide on how to use custom instructions — this article is the feature spotlight; that one is the workshop.
Where Custom Instructions Fit in the Personalization Stack
InnerHaven gives you four overlapping ways to shape a companion. Custom instructions are powerful precisely because they sit between the others, doing the work the broader controls cannot.
Roles
The biggest dial. Choosing a role — Best Friend, Confidant, Coach, and the rest of the nine — sets the emotional frame of every interaction. Your instructions adjust the voice inside that frame; they don’t override it.
Personality Modifiers
Sliders for broad traits like warmth, humor, and directness. Think of these as the equalizer on a stereo — useful for setting the overall mix. Custom instructions are the note you hand the DJ about which songs to play and which to skip.
Memory
On Starter and Unlimited, your companion remembers details you share during conversations — preferences, stories, names. Instructions are what you teach it before the conversation begins; memory is what it learns along the way. The two together build a companion that arrives briefed and keeps learning.
Custom Greetings
The sibling feature. Greetings are the first message you see when you open a chat, with placeholders for your name and the companion’s. Instructions shape every message after that. Pair them and the opening sets the mood while the instructions hold the tone for the rest of the conversation.
Why Even Two Sentences Change Everything
The reason custom instructions punch above their weight is that they are persistent. A single tweak to a conversation only affects that reply. A tweak to your custom instructions affects every reply for the rest of the relationship, across every chat with that companion. That compounding is why a tiny change — “Keep responses under three sentences unless I ask you to elaborate” — can transform months of conversations.
The companions on InnerHaven are designed to be shaped this way. Custom instructions are not a workaround for a generic AI; they are a first-class control surface. The platform expects you to use them — and rewards you for doing so with conversations that feel less like product output and more like talking to someone who has been paying attention for a while.
Privacy and Control
Custom instructions stay with your account, scoped to the companion you wrote them for. They are not shared with other users, not used to train models, and not visible to anyone but you. You can rewrite them at any time, and the change takes effect on the next reply. If you ever want to start fresh on a topic, you can prune memory without touching your instructions, or rewrite your instructions without losing the memory your companion has built up — the two systems work independently, by design.
For a wider look at how your conversations are kept private, see our piece on how InnerHaven protects your data.
How to Start
Open any companion’s settings, find the custom instructions field, and write two sentences: one about the tone you want, and one about something stable in your life right now that matters. Save it. Open a conversation. You will feel the difference inside the first few replies — that quiet sense of being met where you actually are. Iterate from there. Custom instructions are a living document, not a contract, and the best ones get rewritten as you do.
Teach It How to Show Up
Two sentences. One field. Every conversation that follows feels a little more yours.
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