Chat Memory

A good assistant remembers what you told it on turn 3 — even on turn 30.

By default a chat turn only knows what the front-end sends it: the recent message window. For long conversations that means context stated early — a preference, a constraint, an account number — scrolls out of view and the agent starts to feel forgetful.

Chat Memory gives an agent three escalating capabilities, each opt-in per agent so existing agents are unaffected until you turn them on:

1. Persistence — every turn is written to a durable store, keyed by conversationId.
2. Relevance retrieval — older turns relevant to the current question are pulled back into the prompt with BM25.
3. Memory compression — when the older history grows large, it's summarized in one cheap LLM call and the summary (not the raw turns) carries the background context.

Configure all three on the agent, under Administration → AI Agents → Settings.

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1. Persistence

Persistence is the foundation — relevance retrieval and compression both read from it.

Turn it on with chatMemoryEnabled on the agent, and point the platform at a store with turing.logging.engine:

turing:
  logging:
    engine: mongodb     # none | mongodb | redis

With the engine set to none, persistence is a no-op regardless of the agent toggle. With mongodb or redis, each conversation becomes one document/key (chat:{conversationId}) holding its role-tagged turns.

Agent setting	Default	Description
chatMemoryEnabled	false	Persist this agent's turns to the configured engine
chatMemoryFlushIntervalMinutes	5	How often the in-memory write buffer is flushed to the store (turns are batched, not one round-trip per token)
chatMemoryMaxMessages	100	Hard cap on messages kept per conversation; older turns are trimmed

Shared with the Logging engine

Chat memory reuses the same turing.logging.engine backend as server/indexing logs. See Logging and Configuration Reference for engine setup.

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2. Relevance retrieval

Persistence alone gives the model a chronological FIFO of the last N turns. Relevance retrieval adds the most on-topic older turns back on top of that window.

When enabled, on each turn Turing:

1. reads the persisted history,
2. splits it into a recent window (the last chatMemoryRecentN turns, kept verbatim) and an older pool (everything before),
3. builds a tiny in-memory BM25 index over the older pool and scores it against the latest user message,
4. prepends the top chatMemoryRelevanceTopK matches — each tagged with a [earlier turn #… at …] marker so the model can place it on the timeline — ahead of the recent window.

The cost is a few milliseconds per turn (the index is built and discarded per request); the payoff is an agent that recalls a constraint from turn 3 because the current question is about it.

Agent setting	Default	Description
chatMemoryRelevanceEnabled	false	Turn on BM25 retrieval of older turns
chatMemoryRelevanceTopK	5	How many older turns to retrieve (capped at 20)
chatMemoryRecentN	10	Size of the recent window kept verbatim; only turns older than this are scored

Relevance retrieval requires chatMemoryEnabled (there's nothing persisted to retrieve from otherwise).

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Memory compression

Relevance retrieval surfaces specific high-signal turns. But a very long conversation also carries a lot of low-signal background that's expensive to keep shipping verbatim. Memory compression handles that remainder: it summarizes the older pool once, and the compact summary stands in for those turns.

How it works

When chatMemoryCompressionEnabled is on and the older pool (turns past the chatMemoryRecentN window) is estimated to exceed chatMemoryCompressionThresholdTokens:

1. those older turns are summarized in one dedicated LLM call (using a deliberately cheap model — see below),
2. the summary is stored in the Agent Workspace at memory/summary-1-{n}.md,
3. a compact summary block is prepended to the prompt ahead of the relevance-retrieved turns and the recent window.

It composes with relevance retrieval: relevance still surfaces the exact older turns that match the current query (high-signal recovery), while the summary is the cheap default for everything else.

Synchronous vs. background

By default compression runs off the hot path (chatMemoryCompressionAsync: true): the turn that triggers a refresh proceeds uncompressed — reusing the last summary if one exists — and a background worker regenerates the summary for the next turn. This means no chat turn ever blocks on the summary LLM call. The trade-off is eventual compression: the first turn past the threshold isn't compressed yet.

Set chatMemoryCompressionAsync: false to summarize synchronously — the summary applies on the very turn it becomes due, at the cost of that turn waiting on the LLM call.

Either way, the call is throttled to once per chatMemoryCompressionInterval per conversation, so a long chat doesn't pay for a summary every turn.

Agent setting	Default	Description
chatMemoryCompressionEnabled	false	Summarize the older pool when it exceeds the threshold
chatMemoryCompressionThresholdTokens	8192	Older-pool token estimate above which a summary is generated
chatMemoryCompressionLlmId	(unset)	LLM instance used for the summary; unset → the Global Settings default LLM
chatMemoryCompressionInterval	PT1H	Minimum ISO-8601 duration between summaries for one conversation
chatMemoryCompressionAsync	true	Run the summary call in the background (true) vs. synchronously on the turn (false)

Pick a cheap model for the summary

The summary doesn't need a flagship reasoner — set chatMemoryCompressionLlmId to a fast, inexpensive instance (e.g. GPT-4o-mini, Gemini Flash). It runs at most once per interval and only on long conversations.

Compression requires both chatMemoryEnabled and a storage backend (the summary is written to the workspace). With turing.storage.type: none the summary is kept in memory only for the current process.

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How the three layers stack in the prompt

For a long, opted-in conversation, the history the model receives is assembled in this order:

[ memory summary of turns 1–N ]        ← compression (low-signal background)
[ earlier turn #… ] (BM25 matches)     ← relevance retrieval (high-signal recovery)
… recent window (last chatMemoryRecentN turns, verbatim) …
current user message

Each layer is independent and opt-in: persistence with neither retrieval nor compression is a plain durable FIFO; add relevance for recall; add compression to keep the cost of long chats flat.

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Where to watch it

• Chat Analytics surfaces per-conversation turn counts and token usage — the signal that a conversation is long enough to benefit from retrieval/compression.
• Observability timers cover the per-turn setup phases, including memory retrieval.
• Compression summaries appear as artifacts in the Agent Workspace (memory/…), visible in the live artifact stream.

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Related Pages

Page	Description
AI Agents	Where all chat-memory settings live
Agent Workspace	Where compression summaries are stored
Logging	The turing.logging.engine backend chat memory persists to
Chat Analytics	Per-conversation turn + token metrics
Token Usage	Track the cost of the summary model

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