Residency & regions

You decide which region your companion’s data lives in, and weside only offers providers that keep it there.

What it is

Residency is the setting that pins where your companion runs and remembers. You choose a region — EU or USA — and weside routes the language model, the database, embeddings, and voice to providers in that location. There are four ways to set it up:

Region — pick EU or USA plus a quality tier (balanced or deep), and weside selects a matching data-location-aware preset for you.
weside preset — pick a specific named preset directly, with its data locations spelled out.
Bring your own key — supply your own provider API key (see Providers & bring your own key).
None — no residency pinned; the platform default applies.

EU provider paths

When you choose EU residency, weside routes to EU-region infrastructure. Current EU paths for language models:

Anthropic EU — Claude models on Anthropic’s own EU infrastructure.
OpenAI EU — GPT models on Azure in an EU region.
Google EU — Gemini models on Vertex AI in an EU region.
AWS Bedrock EU (eu-central-1) — Claude Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku 4.5 on Amazon Bedrock in Frankfurt. Same 1 million token context as direct Anthropic, no EU surcharge.

Embeddings (used for semantic memory search) run on Microsoft Azure EU infrastructure, visible in the Data Residency UI under your EU preset details.

Why it matters to you

Your companion’s memory is the most personal data you have here. If you’re in the EU and want your conversations to stay on EU infrastructure, residency is the lever that guarantees it — not a promise in a policy, but a routing rule. The quality tier is a second axis: balanced is the everyday default, deep reaches for the strongest reasoning models. You set both, and they hold for every conversation.

How you use it

Open Settings → Data residency.
Choose a region: EU or USA.
Choose a quality tier: balanced or deep. weside shows the presets available for that region and tier, each listing exactly where its data is processed. (A lighter, system-internal swift tier exists but isn’t a tier you pick — it’s selected automatically and normalized to balanced.)
Confirm. From the next message on, your companion runs on that preset.

You can switch region or tier at any time; the change applies to new activity going forward.

Limits & edge cases

Not every quality tier exists in every region — the list adapts to what’s available where you chose to live.
Bringing your own key replaces the regional preset: your data then goes wherever your provider runs it, so residency is your responsibility, not weside’s.
Changing residency doesn’t move past memories between regions; it changes where new processing happens.