So it is an AI chatbot?

Not really. Most of what you learn here is crafted ahead of time, 360 narrated stories, 360 core teachings, 360 prism dialogues, and 110 council debates. Live AI conversation is one of the ways to learn, for talking an idea through or asking anything, not the whole thing.

Is this really the historical person speaking?

No. Every figure is an AI Echo, a voice shaped by their own writing and ideas. It draws on their real philosophy, and it stays an interpretation. Never a recording, never the actual person.

Does it cost anything?

You get 30 free messages a day, no signup. Want more? Bring your own OpenRouter key. The platform itself is nonprofit and open source. No ads, no paywalls.

Do I need an account to start?

No. Open the app and start learning. The free daily messages work right away. No email, no signup.

Can I run it entirely on my own machine?

Yes. Local Mode lets you point the app at any OpenAI-compatible LLM, like LM Studio, Ollama, or vLLM, and run the audio stack in docker. With Local Mode and self-host, no conversation, voice, or text data leaves your machine. The whole platform is open source under AGPL-3.0, so you can self-host it with one command.

Who are the 30 figures?

Philosophers, scientists, mystics, artists, and activists across 2,500 years. Laozi, Plato, Rumi, Hildegard von Bingen, Galileo Galilei, Albert Einstein, Frida Kahlo, Virginia Woolf, Harriet Tubman, Carl Gustav Jung, and twenty more. Browse all 30 on the figures page.

How do I learn from a figure?

Six ways. Hear a Story from their life. Work through a Wisdom conversation on one of their core teachings. Listen to a four-voice Prism dialogue. Take a short Quest challenge. Ask anything in Free Talk. Or gather a Cosmic Council of four figures to debate one question. The first four form a learning arc.

What is the Cosmic Council?

Four figures around one question, with a moderator holding the thread. There are 110 crafted debates with narrated audio. Or build your own, choosing the lineup and the question yourself.

Where does the audio come from?

Live text-to-speech and speech-to-text run on our own GPU servers in Germany. The narrated stories and debates are stored on EU hosting and served worldwide.

Yes. The code is open under AGPL-3.0, so anyone can read it, audit the privacy claims, contribute, or run their own copy. The content moves to a CC-BY license within 6 to 12 months.

Is the content accurate?

Each voice is grounded in primary works and cross-checked sources. Because the Echoes are AI-rendered, what they say will vary, but the source material does not. Where the prose goes beyond the documented record, the factcheck names what was recreated.

Is it available in German?

Yes. Everything is fully bilingual, English and German, across the content, the interface, and the audio.

Voices from across history

Learn from 30 of history's remarkable people, Marcus Aurelius to Frida Kahlo

A Living Library You Can Talk To

Pick anyone and start learning. Hear a narrated chapter of their life, work through one of their ideas, or sit in on a four-voice debate. You can also just ask them directly. Every voice here is an AI Echo, shaped from a real person's own writing. An interpretation, not a recording.

Nonprofit · Open Source · No User Tracking

Start Exploring

30 free messages a day. No signup needed.

The library

The voices here are what we call echoes. Each one is an AI voice shaped by a historical figure's own writing and ideas, brought into a conversation you can have today. They draw on real philosophy, and they stay interpretations, not the real people and not recordings.

What is Agora Cosmica?

An education platform where thirty remarkable people teach you what they spent a lifetime working out. Philosophers, scientists, mystics, artists, and activists, from Marcus Aurelius and Plato to Ada Lovelace and Frida Kahlo, each with their own researched voice and twelve core teachings. You learn from them through crafted content. Hear a narrated scene from their life. Study one of their core ideas. Sit inside a four-voice dialogue, or let a council argue a question out. Four of those chapters form a learning arc, and when you want to go further you can talk an idea through with any figure or just ask anything. What they teach draws on their real philosophy and the ideas they built over a lifetime. The whole thing is made by a small German nonprofit, and it is open source.

Browse the figures · About the project

360 narrated stories · 360 core teachings · 360 prism dialogues · 110 council debates

The thirty figures

Laozi

Taoism

You will learn to act without forcing.

Maya Angelou

Poetry & Civil Rights

You will learn to find your own voice.

Jane Austen

Literary Realism

You will learn to read what people don't say.

Marcus Aurelius

Stoicism

You will learn to question your first reaction.

Simone de Beauvoir

Existentialist Feminism

You will learn to see how you were made.

Hildegard von Bingen

Christian Mysticism

You will learn to notice the life in things.

Joseph Campbell

Comparative Mythology

You will learn to read your own turning points.

Dōgen Zenji

Zen Buddhism

You will learn to stop chasing the next moment.

Emily Dickinson

American Poetry

You will learn to tell the truth slant.

Albert Einstein

Theoretical Physics

You will learn to keep asking why.

Meister Eckhart

Christian Mysticism

You will learn to stop clutching what you love.

Galileo Galilei

Natural Philosophy

You will learn to test what you are told.

Mohandas Gandhi

Nonviolent Resistance

You will learn to stay willing to be wrong.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

German Classicism

You will learn to look until you understand.

Siddhartha Gautama

Buddhism

You will learn to watch wanting rise and fade.

Carl Gustav Jung

Depth Psychology

You will learn to meet your own shadow.

Frida Kahlo

Art & Identity

You will learn to look at yourself without flinching.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Civil Rights & Theology

You will learn to resist without hate.

Ada Lovelace

Mathematics & Computing

You will learn to see what a thing could become.

Nelson Mandela

Ubuntu & Liberation

You will learn to free yourself from bitterness.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Classical Music

You will learn to find freedom inside the rules.

William Blake

Visionary Poetry

You will learn to see the chains you forged.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Existential Philosophy

You will learn to build your own meaning.

Plato

Classical Philosophy

You will learn to examine your own life.

Rumi

Sufi Mysticism

You will learn to let your longing guide you.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Philosophy of Will

You will learn to see through the wanting.

William Shakespeare

Renaissance Drama

You will learn to see a person from inside.

Virginia Woolf

Modernist Literature

You will learn to wake inside an ordinary moment.

Harriet Tubman

Liberation & Faith

You will learn to act before fear stops you.

Leonardo da Vinci

Renaissance Polymath

You will learn to train your own eye.

Six ways to learn from a mind

Different questions ask for different paths. Most of it is crafted ahead of time, made to teach. Two are live conversation, for when you want to take it further.

Story

Story sets up the teaching, a narrated chapter from a figure's life that opens the idea, twelve chapters, checked against the record.

Wisdom

Wisdom is where you take one of their core teachings and think it through, in your own words and your own life.

Prism

Prism lets you hear four connected minds circle a single theme from their own angles, like a podcast you can sit inside.

Quest

Quest is a short Socratic challenge, four questions that go deeper than surface knowledge.

Free Talk

Free Talk is an open conversation. Ask anything and follow it wherever it goes.

Cosmic Council

Cosmic Council puts four figures in one room, debating a single question while you listen.

The library that teaches you runs deep. 360 narrated stories, 360 core teachings, 360 prism dialogues, and 110 council debates, every one written ahead of time and given narrated audio.

Thirty teachers, life's biggest questions

From ancient philosophers to modern artists, from Eastern sages to Western scientists. Laozi and Marcus Aurelius. Maya Angelou and Jane Austen. Carl Gustav Jung, Frida Kahlo, and Virginia Woolf. Thirty in all, each with a page of their own, their teachings gathered around eight questions people have always asked. Follow a name, or follow a question. Either way, you go further.

Eight questions

Who Am I? What binds us to each other? What makes a life worth living? Where do ideas come from? How should we live? What does it mean to be free? What lies beyond what we know? How do we carry what we've lost?

The Cosmic Council

Some questions are too big for one voice. The Cosmic Council puts four figures in a room around a single question and lets them disagree. A moderator holds the thread, three thinkers push back on each other, and you listen to ideas collide the way they never could in their own lifetimes. There are 110 crafted debates ready to play, each with full narrated audio. Or build your own. Choose the moderator, choose the three voices, choose the question, and convene a conversation that has never happened before.

Featured debate

The Calling That Won't Shut Up

There is a voice inside you that insists you are not doing what you were made for. Is it wisdom or is it vanity?

On work, vocation, and the voice that says you were meant for something else

Goethe

Campbell

Lovelace

Gandhi

Enter the Cosmic Council

Honest, by design

Honest

We are upfront about what this is. Every figure is an AI Echo, an interpretation grounded in primary works and historical context. Never a recording, never claimed to speak for the real person. Each figure ships with factchecks that name what is verified and what is recreated for the story.

Private

Your conversations stay in your browser, encrypted with AES-256. Bring your own OpenRouter key if you like, and it never touches our servers. No tracking cookies, no third-party analytics, no profiles of who you are. What is yours stays yours.

Open

Live speech runs on our own GPUs in Germany, the rest of the audio on EU hosting, and the whole codebase is open under AGPL-3.0. You can also run it entirely on your own machine. Local Mode points the app at any OpenAI-compatible LLM, like LM Studio, Ollama, or vLLM, and runs the audio stack in docker, so no conversation, voice, or text data ever leaves your computer. So you don't have to trust us. You can check.

Meet the figures · How it works

Questions people ask

What is Agora Cosmica?: An education platform built as a living library you can talk to. Thirty figures from the past teach you through narrated life stories, core teachings, and four-voice debates, and you can talk an idea through with them too, from Marcus Aurelius to Frida Kahlo, in English and German. Nonprofit, open source, and built to be checked.
So it is an AI chatbot?: Not really. Most of what you learn here is crafted ahead of time, 360 narrated stories, 360 core teachings, 360 prism dialogues, and 110 council debates. Live AI conversation is one of the ways to learn, for talking an idea through or asking anything, not the whole thing.
Is this really the historical person speaking?: No. Every figure is an AI Echo, a voice shaped by their own writing and ideas. It draws on their real philosophy, and it stays an interpretation. Never a recording, never the actual person.
Does it cost anything?: You get 30 free messages a day, no signup. Want more? Bring your own OpenRouter key. The platform itself is nonprofit and open source. No ads, no paywalls.
Do I need an account to start?: No. Open the app and start learning. The free daily messages work right away. No email, no signup.
Can I run it entirely on my own machine?: Yes. Local Mode lets you point the app at any OpenAI-compatible LLM, like LM Studio, Ollama, or vLLM, and run the audio stack in docker. With Local Mode and self-host, no conversation, voice, or text data leaves your machine. The whole platform is open source under AGPL-3.0, so you can self-host it with one command.
Who are the 30 figures?: Philosophers, scientists, mystics, artists, and activists across 2,500 years. Laozi, Plato, Rumi, Hildegard von Bingen, Galileo Galilei, Albert Einstein, Frida Kahlo, Virginia Woolf, Harriet Tubman, Carl Gustav Jung, and twenty more. Browse all 30 on the figures page.
How do I learn from a figure?: Six ways. Hear a Story from their life. Work through a Wisdom conversation on one of their core teachings. Listen to a four-voice Prism dialogue. Take a short Quest challenge. Ask anything in Free Talk. Or gather a Cosmic Council of four figures to debate one question. The first four form a learning arc.
What is the Cosmic Council?: Four figures around one question, with a moderator holding the thread. There are 110 crafted debates with narrated audio. Or build your own, choosing the lineup and the question yourself.
How do you handle my privacy?: Your conversations stay in your browser, encrypted with AES-256. No tracking cookies, no third-party analytics, no profiles of you. If you bring your own key, it never touches our servers.
Where does the audio come from?: Live text-to-speech and speech-to-text run on our own GPU servers in Germany. The narrated stories and debates are stored on EU hosting and served worldwide.
Is it open source?: Yes. The code is open under AGPL-3.0, so anyone can read it, audit the privacy claims, contribute, or run their own copy. The content moves to a CC-BY license within 6 to 12 months.
Is the content accurate?: Each voice is grounded in primary works and cross-checked sources. Because the Echoes are AI-rendered, what they say will vary, but the source material does not. Where the prose goes beyond the documented record, the factcheck names what was recreated.
Is it available in German?: Yes. Everything is fully bilingual, English and German, across the content, the interface, and the audio.

Built for learning, open to everyone

Agora Cosmica is a project of ChipMates gemeinnützige GmbH, a small German nonprofit in Freiburg. Charitable status means we answer to a mission, not to investors. No profits, no shareholders, just the work. The way you learn from each figure follows a four-step arc. Receive an idea, explore it, connect it, then prove you have it. No prerequisites, no paywalls. Schools and universities are welcome to bring it to their students, and developers can read every line or self-host the whole platform with one command. We count it a success the day you outgrow us, moving from our introductions to the primary texts, from AI conversations to human teachers, from curiosity to committed study. We are early, and we will get things wrong. When we do, tell us at [email protected]. We are not building this for you. We are building it with you.

“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” — Rumi

About · Contact · Figures · Themes