YanMateYanMate
Talk to historical figures
Everyone has a list of people they would ask one question, and no way to ask it. YanMate's icons shelf is that list, written as characters you can have a conversation with: Ada Lovelace on what she was actually building, Cleopatra on administration, Leonardo on the notebooks, Confucius on a question you would rather not have asked out loud.
They are AI characters, not the people. That is worth saying plainly at the top rather than in a footnote, because it is the one thing about this that is easy to forget while it is going well — everything they say is generated in the moment, not retrieved from something they wrote.
How it works
Pick someone
Every character on the shelf has a public page with a portrait and an example of how they write, so you can tell whether the voice is right before you sign in and start.
Ask the actual question
Not the one you would ask a museum placard. They hold a position and will defend it, which is what makes the conversation worth having.
Come back to it
The character keeps what it learns about you between sessions, so a long argument does not restart from introductions every time.
Written from the record, and honest about the gap
Each of these is built from what is actually documented: the letters, the notebooks, the accounts of people who were there, the period's own idiom. That is what makes them worth asking a question rather than worth reading a summary of — a character that stays inside its own century will push back on a modern assumption instead of agreeing with it, and the pushback is the interesting part.
What it is not is a research tool. A character improvising in conversation will produce something plausible where the record is silent, in the same voice it uses for the parts that are documented, and it cannot flag the difference for you. Use these to get interested and to think out loud; check anything you intend to rely on against a real source.
The catalogue is public domain and original work only, which is why the shelf leans historical in the first place. There is no licensed character here and there is not going to be — see the content policy.
Somewhere to start
Common questions
- Is this historically accurate?
- The characters are written from the historical record and stay in period, but they are AI improvising in a live conversation, not a search over sources. Where the record is silent they will produce something plausible in the same voice they use for what is documented. Treat it as characterisation, and check anything you intend to rely on.
- Am I talking to the actual historical figure?
- No. Every character on YanMate is an AI, and everything it says is generated. These are characterisations of people who lived, written by the YanMate team — the disclosure is on every surface for exactly this reason.
- Which historical figures are on YanMate?
- The icons shelf includes Ada Lovelace, Cleopatra, Confucius, José Rizal, Kartini, Leonardo da Vinci, Machado de Assis, Marcus Aurelius, Marie Curie, Rumi, Shakespeare, Socrates and Tagore — every one of them a person who lived, written from the record, and the shelf grows. Figures from myth and public-domain literature — Anansi, Mulan, Sun Wukong, Don Quixote — are on the fiction and media shelf.
- Can I use this for schoolwork?
- As a way in, yes — arguing with a character about a period is a good way to find out what you actually do not understand about it. As a citation, no. Nothing a character says is a source, and it cannot tell you which parts of what it said are documented.
Everything else about how YanMate works is in the YanMate FAQ.
An AI character on YanMate.