Memories and knowledge base

Otis keeps what it knows about your product in two stores. A memory is one short fact, such as who your customers are or what your team is working toward. The knowledge base holds whole documents, such as a strategy memo or a pricing page.

This page explains where the contents of each store come from, how long Otis relies on them, and how to correct them.

Purpose of memories and documents

Telemetry shows what users did. It doesn't say what your product is for, who it is sold to, or what your team considers a good result. Otis needs those facts to decide which findings matter and how to describe them. It records them once, so that you don't have to repeat them in every conversation.

Memories

Sources of memories

• You tell Otis. When you state a fact about your product, your business or your customers in a chat, Otis saves it. It doesn't ask you to confirm first. This is how most memories are created, starting with onboarding.
• The setup agent. The coding agent that instruments your code records a profile of your codebase and the configuration it writes, such as your funnels.
• Your settings. Your guidelines and priorities are stored as memories.
• Otis itself. Otis writes some memories from your telemetry and from its own investigations. The next section describes them.

A fact from a document you upload during onboarding is also saved as a memory. A fact from the company research that Otis runs during onboarding is saved only after you confirm it.

Memories that Otis writes itself

• Who uses your product. Once a day, Otis summarizes the last 30 days of telemetry: the roles and titles in your users' properties, your most active accounts, and how usage is spread. It reads this summary next to what you said about your ideal customer, as a check on it.
• What changed recently. Once a day, Otis summarizes the last 14 days of changes, together with the pull requests merged in a repository you have connected.
• What it found before. Otis remembers the answers its investigations reached, and shows related ones to later investigations, with their dates. It relies on an earlier answer without measuring again only when that answer is recent and a close match. An old answer stops being shown, and one that a later measurement contradicts is marked as overturned.

Otis maintains these three kinds of memory itself.

Memory aging

A memory can carry a validity period. Once the period has passed, Otis trusts the memory less, and later stops using it in its analysis. A memory without a validity period is used indefinitely.

Some kinds have their own rule:

• A priority stops being used after 60 days, unless it was saved with a different period.
• Guidelines never expire.

If a fact about your business has a short life, such as this quarter's goal, restate it when it changes.

The knowledge base

Adding a document

Upload a file in a chat with Otis. Otis accepts PDF, plain text, Markdown, PNG and JPEG files of up to 10 MB.

A file you upload during onboarding joins the knowledge base automatically. In a later chat, an uploaded file is used for that conversation only, unless you ask Otis to add it to the knowledge base.

The report from the company research that Otis runs during onboarding is also stored in the knowledge base.

Document processing and search

Otis reads each document once and writes a summary of it. When Otis later searches the knowledge base, it finds documents through these summaries. It can then open a matching document and read all of it.

For a detail that matters, put it in a short document of its own, or tell Otis the fact directly so that it becomes a memory.

Otis treats a document as background. It is instructed not to let a document override a fact that you have stated.

Conflicting sources

• The same fact, stated again, replaces the old one.
• Different sources are kept side by side. Otis is shown what you said, what it observed and what your documents say, each labeled with its source. It is instructed to treat your statements as the authority, its own observations as a check on them, and documents and research as unverified.
• Check a correction that doesn't hold. If Otis keeps repeating something you corrected, ask it to show what it has saved on the subject, and correct that entry.

Visibility

Memories and documents belong to a project, and every member of the project's team can ask Otis about them.

Otis also keeps personal notes about your own preferences and working style. It reads them, with your name, whenever it works on the project for anyone. Treat a personal note as visible to your team.

Redaction applies to telemetry. Memories and uploaded documents are stored as you provide them, so keep personal data out of what you tell Otis and out of the files you upload. Privacy covers this alongside the redaction of telemetry.

Inspecting and correcting what Otis knows

• To see what Otis knows, ask it in chat.
• To correct a fact, state the correct one in chat.
• To delete a memory, use the setup agent. A coding agent connected to the MCP server can list and remove memories.

Related

• Context covers how memories and documents affect what Otis publishes and says.
• Customization covers guidelines, priorities and the other settings that are stored as memories.
• Onboarding covers the questions Otis asks when a project is set up.