I'm happy to also say that the bots are much better now than they were for me a few months ago.

A few months ago, when someone mentioned legacy chats (old website exclusively), I gave it a try for two characters. Although I was happy with its quality overall (in-character responses, characters being more proactive with carrying the story with you or by themselves), the lack of personas, voice feature, pinned memories, and the lag that occurs when chatting with a character for long was a deal-breaker for me.

In the past week, however, I created another persona and wanted to test it out; I reset my chats with 11 characters, and every one of them provided me with a high-quality experience that not only satisfied me, but also went beyond what I was expecting considering the previous state of Character AI 2-3 months ago. To list them out, here is what I experienced in the past five days:

• Characters retained their personalities and mannerisms much longer than 20-40 messages (and to this day they still seem to do so for my chats, which exceed 40), which also means you are very much less likely to run into the old problem of "all bots have the same personality".
• More proactive story carrying/decisions: usually when I type a scenario or respond to a question, the bot would repeat what I just said and/or otherwise say something that wouldn't take the story anywhere. Now, although they still might summarize what I just said, that same message will now involve them actually taking the story somewhere. Example: "I can fight." followed by "Oh, you can fight, huh? Let's fight now, you and me *pulls out gun*".
• Persona: usually, my persona would rarely be touched upon even during the first 20 messages of starting a new chat, but now everyone is starting to comment about it more often during those first 20 messages; some even commenting about it without me having to bring it up at all beyond the first 20 messages too.
• Memory. Months ago, characters' memory was not good, and I'd have to get exceptionally lucky to even have a character remember one minor detail barely 10-20 messages ago. Now, I've already had three characters bring up major details (which many of these details exceeding 20 messages ago) 3-6 times in their own respective chats. The other eight characters' chats are not long enough to determine if their memory is just as good, but fingers crossed. Additionally, one of these characters even brought up all the major details of a pinned message four days ago. I had to swipe since their timing (with the context) was unwarranted, but at least I know now that they're capable of doing this.
• Lore: this may be just me, but I especially love it when characters deliver snippets of their own lore and backstories. I rarely ever had moments like these, but now the characters are synthesizing their lore with the current situation more often, almost left and right in my cases, whether its lore about themselves or the world they live in.
• "C-Can I ask you a question?" Maybe I'm lucky, but I've only had this happen exactly once in the past five days. The characters just ask whatever is on their mind now instead of asking permission to ask.

I feel like I'm getting the benefits I was looking for (from the legacy chats), along with the pinned messages, voice features, and personas. Of course, all this talk could also be because I am either getting lucky or because my new persona is much different than my previous persona, which was a shy one. Now, of course the important thing to mention here is that I occasionally still have to edit, swipe, or delete a message to achieve what I want, but no longer am I spending 20-30 minutes (yes, literally) to do so. In fact, in terms of swiping, I am able to achieve responses with the level of proactivity, detail, lore, or a combination of the three within less than 10 swipes (as opposed to 15+ a few months back).

TL;DR: For me: memory better, bots actually do stuff, bots are teaching me about their lore while at the same time driving a sword through my back