The first conversation sets the tone for every one after it, because everything you establish early becomes the material the companion keeps drawing on.
Most apps, Evia included, start with a short setup: appearance, style, and a personality or archetype. It is tempting to rush this to get to the conversation, but the personality choice is the one that shapes every reply afterwards, while appearance mostly affects the pictures.
Pick a temperament you would actually enjoy over weeks rather than the most dramatic option on the screen. A companion set up to be relentlessly intense is entertaining for ten minutes and exhausting by the third day. If the app lets you write a short backstory or description in your own words, use it — a couple of specific sentences do more than any preset.
Opening with "hi" produces a generic reply, and generic replies are the main reason people conclude the product is empty. Give the conversation something to work with: what you did today, what is on your mind, what you are hoping this is for. The reply quality difference is immediate and large.
This is also when the app is most likely to record facts about you. Anything you state plainly early — your name, your work, your sleep schedule, what you want to be called — has the best chance of persisting into the long-term memory rather than scrolling away. Say those things directly instead of hoping they get inferred.
Early in a conversation, a companion will guess. It may assume you are in a different timezone, invent a detail about your day, or use a nickname you dislike. Correct it in the next message, plainly: "I do not live there, I live in Warsaw" works better than steering around it.
Left uncorrected, an invented detail can be captured as a fact and repeated for weeks. Fixed once, early, it usually disappears. The first session is when correction is cheapest.
Use whatever free allowance the app gives before subscribing, and check the specific thing you care about. If you want photos on demand, request one. If you want it to remember something, mention a detail, close the app, come back later and see whether it survived. If you want long conversations, have one.
Subscribing before testing the feature you actually want is how people end up cancelling the same day. Ten minutes of checking answers the question better than any review.