A First-Time User's Walkthrough: Chat, Images, and Video in One Session
What this walkthrough covers
If you just created your account and aren't sure what to try first, this is the session to follow. It takes you from zero to having sent a real chat message, understanding what's gated behind a deposit, and knowing exactly what to do next — in roughly the order a new user actually encounters things.
Step 1: Send your first chat message
Open a new conversation and just ask something — a question, a request for help with something you're working on, anything. You don't need to configure anything first. See how to start a chat if you want the full rundown, but the short version is: type, send, and you'll get a real AI response immediately, free tier included.
Notice how the response reads. If it feels too short, too long, too formal, or too casual for your taste, that's adjustable — see step 4.
Step 2: Try asking something harder
SoulrisAI automatically routes your message to a model suited to how complex it is — simple questions go to lighter, faster models; harder or more technical ones get routed to stronger models. You don't have to pick anything for this to work. Our guide on auto model routing explains what's actually happening behind the scenes, but for your first session, just notice that a genuinely hard question and a quick one can feel different in response quality — that's routing doing its job.
Step 3: See where the free tier stops
At some point in an extended free-tier session, you'll hit a quota message rather than a response. That's expected — see how the free trial works for exactly what's limited and why. This is the natural point where most users decide whether to fund their wallet, since it's also the point where image generation, video generation, and document attachments become relevant.
Step 4: Set your response style and display name (optional)
Before or after depositing, open Settings and try a different response style — concise, detailed, casual, or formal — and see how differently the same question gets answered. Add a display name if you want the AI to address you by it occasionally. Neither changes what you can do, both change how it feels to use. Full details: setting your response style and personalizing with your display name.
Step 5: Fund your wallet (if you want to go further)
Image generation, video generation, document generation, and chat attachments all require a wallet balance — the free tier covers chat only. Deposits are small and deliberately low-friction so you can try the paid features without committing much.
Step 6: Generate your first image
Once your wallet has a balance, try a prompt describing something specific — subject, style, setting. You'll see a quality/cost choice before it generates. This is covered start to finish in how to generate your first AI image, and writing effective image prompts helps you get better results.
Step 7: Generate your first video
Video works similarly but takes noticeably longer to process, since more computation goes into producing a few seconds of coherent motion than a single still image. You'll see an estimated cost before committing, and the generation status updates as it progresses rather than making you guess whether it's working. If you later want a multi-scene project, see what a Movie is on SoulrisAI.
What to do after this session
By the end of this walkthrough you've touched the core of the product: chat, model routing, the free-tier boundary, personalization, and your first paid generation. From here, the chat guides go deep on prompting and attachments, and the image/video guides go deep on getting generations that actually match what you had in mind. Read whichever matches what you want to make next.