What Canto remembers

Canto can carry what you settled in one chat into the next: a decision, a preference, a commitment you made. It can also look up what you discussed in earlier chats. Both are kept in your vault on your Mac, both can be switched off, and every item can be seen, changed or forgotten.

"Memory" here means what Canto keeps between chats. The ring around the model chip in Ask is something else: how full the current chat is in the model's memory (see Models on your Mac).

Remembered items#

A remembered item is one short statement, of one of six kinds:

When an item matters to what you're asking, Canto brings it into the chat: a few at a time, at most six per message. An answer that used remembered items lists them in its Context used line, each with why it was used, Open (the chat it came from), Mark done for commitments and open loops, and Forget.

Keeping something#

• From a chat: under an answer, ⋯ › Remember this… opens the Remember sheet with the statement filled in. Choose its kind and whether it belongs to you (Personal) or to one project, then save.
• Yourself: Remember… on the Remembered page, or on a project's page.
• From suggestions: with Settings › Memory & privacy › What Canto remembers › Suggest new items on (it's off), Canto proposes items after a chat settles something. They wait in the Inbox and on the Remembered page with Keep, Edit… and Not now. Nothing is kept until you say so. Suggestions are written by the chat's own model.

The Remembered page#

Remembered is in the sidebar's Library (⌘K: Open Remembered). It shows In use, Suggested and Needs review, with Completed, Replaced and Archived under More. Filter by kind or by scope (Personal or a project), or search.

Each row says what kind it is, which chat it came from and when. Its ⋯ menu (or a right-click) has Edit…, Pin, Mark done, Replaced by (a newer item takes its place), Archive (kept, but no longer brought into chats), Open the source chat and Forget…, which deletes the item for good after asking.

Needs review lists items whose source chat was deleted, so you can check them.

Searching past chats#

A chat can also look up what you discussed before, when it helps: "what did we decide about the pricing page?" Answers that use an earlier chat cite it, and the citation opens that chat at the right message.

• Recall past chats, in the composer's Sources menu, turns it on or off for one chat.
• Keep out of recall, in a chat's right-click menu (in the sidebar or All chats), means that chat is never searched. Include in recall undoes it.
• Settings › Memory & privacy › What Canto remembers has the rest: Search past chats (on), Find past chats by Words, Meaning or Both (Both), Index chats by meaning (on, done on your Mac in the background) and Index all chats again.

Turning it off#

In Settings › Memory & privacy › What Canto remembers:

Everything Canto remembers opens the Remembered page.

Where it goes#

Remembered items and the chat index are in your vault on your Mac, encrypted like your notes. They go into a chat's prompt like any other context: when a chat runs on a model on your Mac, nothing leaves it; when a chat runs on a cloud model, the items and past chats it uses go to that service with the rest of the chat. See Servers and cloud models.