# Desktop Pet

> A character on your desktop that reacts to agent activity and speaks with its own voice, and how to choose and tune it.

The Desktop Pet is a floating character that reacts to MCP activity and says what the agents are doing. It is in the **System** group of the sidebar.

[Screenshot: The Desktop Pet screen with a gallery of characters, a preview with a speech bubble and the persona with its voice values. The sample data shown is made up.]

## Show the pet

Click **Show pet** at the top of the screen, and **Hide pet** to hide it. Under **Behaviour**, **Enable desktop pet** turns it on or off. You can also **Keep above other windows** and **Click through the pet**, so clicks reach the window under it. Under **Window** choose the display, position and size, and **Reset position** if it is lost.

The pet is gone while the sign-in screen is up, and nothing brings it back until you sign in.

## Choose a character

The gallery has 16 characters in three groups, which you choose with **Character tier**: **Default characters** (5), **Pro / Premium** and **VIP**. The tier is a grouping of the gallery. Click a character to select it. The preview shows five moods: **Idle**, **Working**, **Speaking**, **Happy** and **Error**. **Listen** plays a sample line with sound.

Each character is a persona with a short role, a tagline, three traits and four voice values: **Formality**, **Verbosity**, **Humour** and **Warmth**.

## What it says and when

- **Speak on**: **Session start and end**, **Denied or failed tool calls**, **Test and script results**, **Every tool call**, **Index build progress**.
- **Chattiness**: **Quiet**, **Balanced** or **Chatty**.
- **Return to idle after** a number of minutes.
- **Voice**: **Mute** and **Volume**.

**Recent pet messages** lists what the pet said in this session of the application, with the time, mood, event and client. The list is not kept: the audit log never stores Desktop Pet messages.

## The persona in agent replies

**Scope** is **Pet only** or **Pet + agent**. With **Apply persona to agent replies** on, [Harnesses Manage](/devhub/features/harnesses/index.md) writes the voice of the character into the instructions it generates, so the agent answers in that voice and not only the speech bubble does. Update an installation to carry a change.

> **Note:** The pet is open to every signed-in account.

## Related

- [Harnesses](/devhub/features/harnesses/index.md)
- [Activity](/devhub/features/activity-log/index.md)
- [The Desktop Pet is not visible](/devhub/troubleshooting/pet-not-visible/index.md)