Memory is usually introduced as a capability - the agent should remember returning customers. It is more usefully treated as a retention policy that happens to improve conversations.
Three tiers with different rules
- Turn state. What is happening now. Lives in the session, dies with it, never crosses a channel boundary.
- Episode summary. A compact record of one completed conversation. Persisted, and shared across channels only above an identity-confidence threshold.
- Durable facts. Preferences, entitlements, history. Persisted in a system of record and read through a tool - never in an agent-private store.
The agent should have no private long-term memory. Durable facts belong in the CRM, the booking system, the ticket system. When a customer exercises a deletion right, there is then exactly one place to delete from - a property that is close to impossible to retrofit.
Recall is gated by identity, not by availability
Having a record and being entitled to use it are different questions. A caller ID is evidence, not authentication: numbers are spoofed, phones are shared, and businesses answer from a switchboard.
We score identity evidence and gate recall on it. Below the threshold the agent may verify but not volunteer - it can ask whether this is about the enquiry from Monday once given a reason to, but it may not open the call by reciting what it knows. Confident recall from an unauthenticated channel reads as surveillance even when it is correct.
| Channel | Evidence | Strength |
|---|---|---|
| Authenticated web session | Login | Strong |
| Verified callback | We dialled a stored number | Good |
| Inbound call | Caller ID | Weak - spoofable, shared |
| Web widget | Cookie / device | Weak - shared devices |
| Messaging | Account handle | Moderate |
What to write, and when
Writing memory at the end of a conversation is simple and loses the calls that end abruptly - which are disproportionately the ones worth remembering. Writing continuously is expensive and captures noise. We write on commitment events: when the agent promises something, books something, or establishes a fact it will be held to.
This has a pleasant side effect: the memory record is a list of things the business is on the hook for, which is closer to what an operations team actually wants than a transcript summary is.
Forgetting is a feature
- Every memory entry carries a retention class and an expiry. An entry with no expiry is a bug.
- Provenance travels with the entry: which conversation, which channel, which evidence supported it.
- Deletion is by subject, not by conversation - the request is "forget me", not "forget that call".
- Stale beats wrong: an expired preference should disappear rather than be applied to a customer who has changed their mind.
Where we are unsure
The evidence weights are our judgement, not a calibration - we have not measured how often each signal is actually right, and the thresholds encode a risk appetite that should probably differ by industry. A booking agent for a hair salon and one for a medical practice should not use the same numbers, and currently ours do.