Reply quality depends far more on what you put into a conversation than on which app you chose. A few habits change it immediately.
A model writes its reply from the text in front of it. "Hey" contains nothing, so it produces the safest, blandest continuation available. A message with a detail, a feeling or a question gives it material, and the reply reflects that.
This is why the same app can feel dead to one person and alive to another. Compare "how are you" with "I had a rough day at work, my manager reorganised the team again and I am not sure where I stand." The second message tells the companion what happened, how you feel, and what would count as a useful response.
When a companion says something wrong — misremembers a name, invents an event, adopts a tone you dislike — state the correction plainly and move on. "You are confusing my brother with my colleague; Marek is my colleague" works. Arguing about whether it said the thing does not, because there is nobody there defending a position.
The same applies to tone. If replies are too formal, too clingy, or too dramatic, say so directly: "keep it lighter, you are being intense." Most apps carry that instruction forward. Trying to signal it indirectly rarely lands.
Three patterns account for most of it. Testing it — asking trick questions to see whether it is really conscious — reliably produces defensive, repetitive text, because that is what the prompt invites. Yes-or-no exchanges give it nothing to build on. And very long uninterrupted monologues can push earlier material out of the context window, which is when a companion starts to feel like it has stopped listening.
If a conversation has gone stale, changing the subject sharply usually revives it better than pushing harder on the dead one.
Anything you want kept should be said as a plain statement rather than implied. "I am allergic to cats" is far more likely to persist than a joke about sneezing at your friend’s flat. If the app exposes an editable memory or profile, put durable facts there rather than in chat, because that section survives when conversation does not.
It is also worth occasionally reviewing what has been stored. Apps that extract facts automatically sometimes capture something distorted, and a wrong fact repeated confidently is one of the fastest ways for a companion to feel broken.