Character preview
Preview your SillyTavern character
SillyTavern characters are TavernCard files — Desire AI reads them directly in your browser. Drop the card below for an instant, accurate preview of her profile. Chatting as her needs an account, which we're wiring next.
In SillyTavern, open the character panel → Export → PNG card.
What is a SillyTavern import?
SillyTavern is the reference implementation for the TavernCard format — chara_card_v2/v3, PNG or .json — so "importing a SillyTavern card" is really just reading the same file SillyTavern itself would load. Nothing about the format changes; what changes is where it runs.
SillyTavern is a self-hosted front end: you install it, and separately configure it to talk to an API (OpenAI, Claude, a local model, or a proxy). Desire AI reads the same card but skips all of that setup — the card becomes a preview immediately, in the browser, with no backend to configure.
What carries over
- Name and description-derived appearance
- Personality and scenario
- First message
- Up to five example exchanges from mes_example
- Tags, reclassified into Desire AI's taxonomy
- System prompt, when the card sets one
- Content rating inferred from tags
What doesn't transfer
- World info / lorebook entries (character_book) — SillyTavern power users rely on these heavily for long-running scenarios, and the current importer does not read them
- Advanced prompt-injection decorators (@@depth, @@position and similar) that a SillyTavern lorebook entry can carry
- Alternate greetings past the first, and group-chat-only greetings
- Your local SillyTavern settings — API config, sampler presets, extensions — none of that is part of the card and none of it applies to a hosted product
- Chat history, since SillyTavern's export is the character file, not the conversation log
How to import your SillyTavern character
- 1.In SillyTavern, open the character panel → Export → PNG card.
- 2.Drop the exported file on the import box below.
- 3.Review the preview — it's read straight from the card's own fields, no re-typing.
- 4.Nothing is uploaded or persisted at this step; parsing runs in your browser.
- 5.Saving the imported character to an account and chatting as her is the next piece we're building — browse Desire AI's roster to chat now.
Why people leave SillyTavern
SillyTavern is a genuinely capable front end, and the honest reason to move a card off it isn't that SillyTavern is worse — it's that it requires installing and maintaining software and paying for or supplying your own model access, which is real friction for anyone who just wants to talk to a character. Desire AI's own review of the highest-engagement r/SillyTavernAI threads (7 posts in a 38-post, 7-subreddit dataset, May–July 2026; methodology at desireai.app/research/reddit-ai-companion-sentiment-2026) found it's a builder community first — four of those seven posts were prompt-preset or setup content, not platform complaints — which tracks: SillyTavern users are largely happy with the tool and are solving a different problem (hosting, not the software) when they look at an import path like this one.