The series tells the story of Hideki Motosuwa, who finds an abandoned persocom, or personal computer with human form, that he names Chi after the only word she initially can speak.
One night, while walking home from a convenience store, he finds a persocom lying in the trash outside his apartment building.
Also, because of the time spent by himself on his family's farm (which in the anime is revealed to be in Hokkaidō), Hideki has a habit of thinking out loud and talking to himself.
Like many young men, Hideki has an active libido, possessing many pornographic magazines which he refers to as "okazu" ("side dish").
In fact Shinbo himself proudly admits that Plum (Sumomo in the anime) is also equipped to perform these tasks when he first meets Hideki.
Despite his shortcomings and occasional moments of awkwardness with the bustling environment of Tokyo, Hideki is a genuinely kind and honest person, whose habit of thinking of others' well-being before his own can cause many problems.
Although many characters in the series often tease him for being a "nice guy", mostly by saying that's why he's a virgin, they turn to him for advice with their problems, knowing he will always hear them out and do his best to assist them.
In an extra 27th episode included on the Chobits anime DVD, it is shown that Hideki is finally admitted to college after studying for a year at the prep school.
Upon Hideki finding the switch and turning her on, she is only able to say the word "chi," remembers nothing of her past life, and is unable to perform even simple tasks.
Through the course of the series, Chi learns basic skills, and eventually takes a job to help support Hideki.
In the manga, she was previously an employee of Piffle Princess Enterprises and participated in the development of Angels and later, persocoms.
She was married to the president of the company, the late Ichiro Mihara (a character from CLAMP's shared universe work Angelic Layer[2]), who used the data gathered from the Angelic Layer research to create the Chobits to be Chitose's children, because she was unable to have children of her own.
Shortly after beginning school he finds his teacher Takako Shimizu in a park late at night because she had been unwittingly locked out of her house by her husband, who was too busy with his persocom.
He eventually fell in love with this persocom and then married her, but she developed a hard disk fault which resulted in the gradual degradation of her memory, until she remembered almost nothing at all.
He could not bring himself to have her repaired because her memories might be lost completely in the process of transferring them to a new hard drive, and he felt she would not be the same person if this happened.
Soon, her memory degraded to the point that she could not remember anything for more than a few seconds at a time, and Hiroyasu had to keep a constant watch on her to prevent her from wandering away.
During this time, he makes an ill-advised attempt to sexually molest Chi, and Freya takes over, restraining him with all of the cords attached to her.
The reason for her inferiority complex is that while Yumi was working at Chiroru she fell in love with the manager, Hiroyasu Ueda.
Freya (フレイヤ, Fureiya) was the first Chobit, who was created before Elda by Hibiya's husband, Ichiro Mihara.
Freya lived happily with the Mihara couple for a time, until Hibiya noticed that her attitude was becoming increasingly melancholy, with no explanation as to why.
At this point, Hibiya asked her husband to build a little sister for Freya, in an attempt to make her happy again.
It was only then that Hibiya finally realized the source of Freya's sadness; she had fallen in love with her own father, Mihara.
Freya knew that her father still loved his wife, and did not want to disturb their happiness, so she pained her heart with efforts to suppress her feelings.
Before this could happen, Elda offered to take Freya's heart into her own, so that she would not disappear completely, and so that her memories would be preserved.
In the anime, nobody knew that Elda had taken in Freya's heart; conversely, in the manga, both Hibiya and Mihara learned of this only moments after it occurred.
Wearing an outfit that makes her resemble a genie, she is programmed to be cute and tends to be quite hyperactive, for example leading Hideki in wakeup exercises each morning and dancing when she is in standby mode.
Yuzuki (柚姫) is a custom-built persocom created by Minoru Kokubunji roughly two years before the start of the series.
Yuzuki was created to resemble, physically and mentally, Minoru's late sister, Kaede, who had died from an illness two years earlier and has given her self-teaching software, meaning that she can learn things on her own instead of having to have programs loaded into her as is the case with most persocoms.
Toward the end of the anime and manga, Yuzuki loses a large portion of Kaede's personality data as a result of trying to hack into Zima and being counter-hacked by Dita.
In the anime, Zima remarks that he and Dita were created from the same basic system architecture that Chi is, rendering them immune to her ability to immobilize persocoms.