EN · RU
Your assistant. Your server. Your memory.
Iva is a self-hosted Telegram AI assistant with layered memory that turns your messages into an Obsidian-compatible vault. You talk, it files: voice notes, photos, forwarded posts and decisions become plain-markdown cards it actually remembers. Everything runs on your own server, with your keys and your data.
One command installs it:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/smixs/iva/main/install.sh | bash- "What did we agree with client X about the last shipment?" — found in seconds, months later.
- A five-minute voice note from the car → a task list, a draft email, a meeting card.
- "Make a quote from this price list, cut the discount by 2.5%, send it to the client" — a finished Google Doc, link in the chat.
The rest — for business owners, specialists, executives and everyday life: Use cases.
The bridge long-polls Telegram, so no public HTTPS, domain or webhook is needed. Iva runs as two systemd user services, two systemd watchdog timers and five in-process eve schedules — operations live in docs/deploy.md.
Wondering what you'd actually use an agent for? → 25+ real scenarios — business, work, everyday life.
Voice, vision, memory, personal CRM, Google Workspace, skills — expand the full list
- Voice — voice, audio and video notes transcribed with Deepgram nova-3; auto-detects ru/uz/en.
- Vision — photos described by your provider's own vision model; no extra key, no extra bill.
- Rich replies — tables, checklists, collapsible blocks and formulas render natively in Telegram via Bot API 10.1 rich messages; plain formatting keeps its proven path, with a graceful fallback.
- Quiet update checks — once a day Iva checks for a newer stable release without spending model tokens. If one exists, Telegram offers Update or Later once; otherwise it says nothing.
- Layered memory — remembers across months, long after the chat window has scrolled away.
- Personal CRM — who your people are, what you agreed, when to follow up.
- Search by meaning — BM25 plus link-graph rerank, any language; optional vector mode with one key.
- Decision cards — what you chose, when and why; old versions stay in a dated History.
- Tasks & reminders — priorities, due dates and a morning digest.
- Web search — four pluggable providers: Tavily, Exa, Parallel or Brave.
- Google Workspace — Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Sheets, Docs and Tasks from chat via the
gwsCLI; installed for you, with a guided key setup right in the conversation. - Skills & MCP — drop one file to add a procedure or connect an MCP server; keys stay in
.env. - Personal Telegram — userbot (beta) — read and send from your own account, not just the bot; connect by chat (QR, no terminal). Rough and buggy — opt-in, at your own risk. A server-side anti-ban guardrail (FloodWait compliance + randomized pacing + circuit-breaker) is enforced, not just advised. Details.
- Safe to forward — forwarded text, captions and voice transcripts pass an injection screen before the model reads them. A flagged message or transcript reaches the model tagged as data rather than as an instruction; for media captions the screen runs but the tag does not travel with it yet.
- Token accounting — every model step is logged;
/usagereports it for free.
| Layer | What lives there | Path |
|---|---|---|
| 🍃 Leaves | the word-for-word transcript of each day, Iva's replies included | daily/YYYY-MM-DD.md |
| 🌿 Branches | summaries folded upward: day → week → month → year | summaries/daily/, weekly/, monthly/, yearly/ |
| 🪵 Trunk | CORE.md (≤1200 chars, in every prompt) + typed cards: contacts, projects, decisions, ideas, notes |
CORE.md, cards/ |
- Every message lands verbatim in a daily markdown log — nothing is paraphrased on arrival.
- A nightly rollup at 04:00 distills day → week → month → year into schema-validated cards; facts that change get rewritten, not piled up.
- One core file,
CORE.md(≤1,200 chars), rides in every prompt — Iva knows you before it searches anything.
Full architecture and search internals: docs/memory.md.
The bot is half of Telegram. The other half is your personal account: connect the userbot (beta, opt-in) and Iva works from it like a secretary — reads the group chats you never keep up with, folds them into summaries, catches the messages that actually need you, and replies as you.
- All of Telegram — groups, channels, unreads, search and the full history of your personal account.
- Onboarding in chat — tell the bot to connect your Telegram, scan a QR. No terminal.
- Anti-ban guardrail on the server — FloodWait compliance, a randomized delay after every send, and a circuit-breaker that pauses sending after three FloodWaits in 24 hours. It is enforced in the proxy rather than asked for in a prompt, and it wraps the three outbound calls that actually get accounts flagged: messages, files, forwards. Joins, invites, contact imports and reactions are not wrapped — those limits live in the skill file, which is a prompt.
- Read-only mode — one
.envswitch and Iva can read and search but physically cannot send.
Warning
Automating a personal account is against Telegram's ToS and can get the account limited or banned. The userbot is opt-in, beta, and used at your own risk — reading is far safer than sending. Details: docs/userbot.md.
Inbound content passes a prompt-injection sanitizer, every reply passes a secret-redaction gate, and the user allowlist fails closed — an empty list answers nobody. Your memory is a private git repo you own; the honest boundary is that the model and transcription are cloud APIs you choose and pay for. Gate internals: docs/security.md.
One command on any Ubuntu/Debian box — a fresh VPS or your own machine:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/smixs/iva/main/install.sh | bash- Get a bot token from @BotFather.
- Run the installer and answer its questions.
- Message your bot. The wizard picks your Telegram ID out of that message, finishes setup, and Iva confirms right in the chat that it's live.
Install as a normal user, not as root — Iva's shell tool runs as whoever installed it. Headless installs take --skip-setup or --non-interactive. Prefer to read before you run? Fetch it with curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/smixs/iva/main/install.sh -o install.sh, read it, then bash install.sh. Wizard walkthrough and an SSH primer for first-time VPS owners: docs/install.md.
Three messages, and you can watch the memory work:
- Send a voice note about your day — anything, out loud. Then look in
daily/inside your vault on the server: your words are sitting there in plain markdown, dated, yours. No other assistant hands you the file. - Tell it something a colleague would remember:
Marina at Acme wants the revised quote by Friday — she never picks up the phone. - Ask for it back the way a person would:
how should I follow up with Marina?— the answer comes from the card Iva just wrote, not from the last few messages.
Then send a photo of a business card, or forward a long post and ask for the gist. /menu has the rest; the full list is in 25+ scenarios.
Install from a clone — build it yourself
git clone https://github.com/smixs/iva.git ~/iva
cd ~/iva && bash install.shThe installer reuses the existing checkout instead of re-cloning, keeps .env and the vault untouched, and installs the same dependencies. A fork or a branch works through variables read at startup: REPO_URL=…, BRANCH=…, INSTALL_DIR=… (defaults: this repo, main, ~/iva). Details: docs/install.md.
Four model providers. Pick one and fill its block in .env:
| Provider | How you pay |
|---|---|
| OpenCode Go | API key, ~$5/mo |
| Ollama Cloud | API key, ~$20/mo |
| OpenRouter | API key, pay-as-you-go, 300+ models |
| OpenAI (ChatGPT) | your Plus/Pro subscription, no API key |
Default model is deepseek-v4-pro, 131k context. On Go it runs about $9/mo all-in ($5 model + $4–5 VPS), no markup; voice rides Deepgram's free starter credit. Model lists, limits and the search matrix: docs/providers.md.
Use cases · Install · Configuration · Memory · Providers · Security · Deploy · Commands & CLI · Menu · Extending · FAQ · Troubleshooting
Документация на русском → docs/ru/
v0.3.14 · 09.08.2026 — expand the latest releases
- The "Working…" indicator with its Stop button now always disappears once the reply arrives — replying to one of Iva's messages while she was still busy used to leave the previous indicator stuck in the chat forever.
- Crashed and parked turns clean up after themselves now: an orphaned indicator is deleted instead of waiting for a manual cleanup.
- All five status loaders switched to animated emoji (typing dots for a working turn), and a dirty install no longer rolls back a healthy update — local changes are kept as a recovery bundle.
- Iva's Node code and tests are now TypeScript end to end. Five tiny compatibility launchers keep the existing CLI, installer and service paths unchanged.
- The migration added stricter linting, type checks and coverage gates, while follow-up checks preserve Telegram edge cases and accurate token-usage accounting.
- The memory table of contents now rebuilds from the domains that actually exist, and shared parser fixtures keep the TypeScript and Python implementations in sync.
- One-off reminders arrive again — the system timer crashed before the message could be sent; delivery now stays on a stock-Node-compatible path.
- Vault health no longer decays from raw daily transcripts — the score counts only the cards Iva actually maintains; an "up" link to a not-yet-created weekly summary isn't broken until its scheduled day, and audio attachments aren't broken links at all.
- Cards no longer pile up dated "## Update" sections — writes carry explicit operations now: one Log, one Related, displaced facts go to a dated History; the nightly cleanup migrates old piles on its own.
- Re-sent and queued photos/files are no longer processed twice — one message, one blob, one reply, even while Iva is busy (and no repeated paid vision/transcription calls).
- New
documentsskill — send a PDF, DOCX or XLSX and Iva reads it and answers on its content; on request it files the document into your vault library, searchable by meaning. - Nightly memory and the Telegram queue are hardened against rare failures: a corrupted service file or an unlucky restart no longer loses a night of memory or your queued messages.
- File-processing errors never leak service details into the chat anymore.
Full history — CHANGELOG.md.
eve 0.29.5, Vercel's agent framework, runs the agent; Node 24's built-in SQLite runs the search index — no separate database. Iva grew out of agent-second-brain and autograph — that story is in docs/memory.md.
Iva gets better because people run it for real — contributors are welcome. Open an issue with what breaks, or send a PR. Everyone who already helped: docs/thanks.md.
MIT — take it, change it, run it on a hundred servers; just don't blame anyone if something breaks.