Why a Companion Reply Sometimes Stalls, and What Happens Next

You sent a message. The typing dots appeared, a few words came in, and then nothing. Or the dots sat there and no words came at all. Sometimes the reply ended halfway through a sentence, as if she had been called away from the table.

We read the error logs for exactly these moments, so this is the support-desk version: what you saw, what actually happened on our side, and what to do. The short answer to the last part is one button, and it costs you nothing.

What you saw

Replies on Fellowi stream. The text arrives a piece at a time, so you watch the sentence form instead of waiting for a finished block. That is the nicer way to talk to someone, and it is also why a problem is so visible: you can see exactly where a reply stopped.

A stall takes one of two shapes. The reply never starts, or it starts and stops short. There is a third thing that looks similar and is not a stall at all: you pressed Stop. A reply you stopped is kept exactly as it was at that moment, and nobody pretends otherwise.

The first message in a brand-new chat is no exception. When you open a chat, the companion greets you first, and that greeting is generated the same way as every other reply, so it can stall the same way and is fixed the same way.

What actually happened behind the bubble

Behind the chat there is not one language model but a chain of several, run by different providers. Each turn starts on whichever one is healthiest right now. If that provider fails before it produces a first word, the turn moves to the next one in the chain on its own, and usually you never notice: the dots just last a little longer.

Each attempt gets a short timeout to produce its first word and an absolute timeout for the whole reply, and a turn gets a few attempts before it gives up on a provider. The awkward case is a provider that accepts the request, says it is working on it, and then goes quiet. That is what the first-word timeout is for: until real text arrives, the clock keeps running.

If every provider in the chain is down at the same time, which is rare but happens, you get a visible error rather than a spinner that turns forever. The honest advice then is to try again a little later.

The Photo and Video buttons in a companion chat are a separate path: they go through the queue of the generation studio, so a slow picture is waiting in line, not a stalled reply.

Why it stops short instead of switching voices

Here is the part that surprises people. Once words have started arriving from a provider, the turn is committed to it. If that provider falters in the middle of a sentence, we do not quietly hand the rest of the sentence to a different one.

We could. It would look smoother for a second. But two models do not write alike, and a reply whose second half comes from somewhere else reads like a different person finishing her sentence. A companion's voice is the whole product, so we chose the honest failure: the reply stops where it stopped, and you decide what happens next.

If she sounds off for other reasons, that has its own causes, covered in when your companion breaks character.

What it costs you: nothing

Message limits count the messages you send, and only those. A companion's reply never counts against you, and an empty or interrupted reply never costs you anything. The full accounting is in message limits explained.

On our side, a turn that ends without any text is not swept under the rug. It is recorded as an interrupted empty turn, so we can see how often it happens and to whom. One detail matters: from the server, pressing Stop and losing your connection look identical. Only the app knows which one it was, so the app tells us, and "stopped by you" and "dropped" are counted separately. That is how we know a stop you chose is not a failure we need to chase.

The one button that fixes it

Use Retry on the message. It asks for a fresh reply to the same message you sent, attached to it in the same place, so the conversation stays in order and you do not have to type anything again.

We owe a plain admission here, because it is in our changelog anyway. Before September 2026, Retry after an empty turn could hand back the same empty reply instead of writing a new one, and some paying members ran into exactly that, more than once. It was a real bug and it is fixed: a retry after an empty turn now always generates a real reply.

What the companion knows when she writes that new reply is the same as before: her memories, the conversation so far, her own character. We wrote that part up in what your companion knows when she replies.

What we cannot promise

A stall can still happen. We run several providers precisely because any one of them can have a bad minute, and a chain makes a bad minute rarer, not impossible. We cannot promise a reply time. A reply that stopped short stays short unless you retry it, and we do not resume a half-written sentence where it broke off: Retry writes a new reply, it does not continue the old one.

What we can promise is narrower and more useful: a stalled reply is visible to us, it never costs you a message, and the button that fixes it works.