Memory

Kenzy can remember things — per person. "Hey Kenzy, remember that the gate code is 4312" stores a fact; "what's the gate code?" gets it back. Facts belong to the person who said them (see Speaker Enrollment — memory is one of the things enrolling your voice unlocks), and who can hear a fact back is a deliberate, enforced choice.

Memory is on by default (memory.enabled in LLM configuration). An unrecognized voice gets no memory at all — no writes, no reads, not even echoes of other people's facts. That's the contract everything below builds on.

Asking her to remember

You:    Hey Kenzy, remember that the spare key is under the blue pot
Kenzy:  Okay, I'll remember that.

You:    Hey Kenzy, what do you know about the spare key?
Kenzy:  The spare key is under the blue pot.

You:    Hey Kenzy, forget about the spare key
Kenzy:  Forgotten: the spare key is under the blue pot.

Common phrasings that work: "remember that…", "don't forget that…", "what do you know / remember about…?", "forget (about)…". Anything fuzzier — "didn't I tell you something about the plumber?" — goes through the language model, which has the same remember/recall/forget abilities as tools.

Two phrasings are deliberately not memory:

• "Remember to take out the trash" — that's a reminder (a thing that should happen at a time), and Kenzy treats it as one. See timers and reminders in Talking to Kenzy.
• A bare "forget it" is taken as the colloquial "never mind," not an erase request.

Who can hear a fact back — the three tiers

Every fact has a tier, and the tiers are enforced at answer time:

Tier	Who hears it back	How a fact gets it
Private	Only the person who stored it	The default — every "remember that…" starts private
About them	Anyone Kenzy recognizes	The middle tier for facts about a person that others may ask ("Nicki's birthday is in May") — settable via the memory API today; dashboard re-tiering arrives with the hardening phase
Shared	The whole household	An explicit signal — "everyone should know…", "remember for everyone…" — or "share that with the house" afterwards

You:    Hey Kenzy, everyone should know the wifi password is on the fridge
Kenzy:  Okay, I'll remember that — and everyone can ask me.

Demoting works too: "keep that between us" makes a fact private again.

The walls hold everywhere: a private fact is never spoken to anyone else, never used to answer anyone else's question, and never echoed — if Kenzy just told you a private fact, someone else asking seconds later in the same room doesn't get it replayed from conversation history.

What she remembers on her own

Nothing, in this release. Kenzy only stores what you explicitly ask her to remember — there's no ambient transcript-mining. What she does keep is short-term conversational context: the last few minutes of back-and-forth in a room, plus your own recent exchanges across rooms (so a conversation you started in the kitchen still makes sense from the office). Both expire on their own and respect the same privacy rules.

Memory stays tidy by itself

Saying roughly the same thing twice doesn't leave two facts lying around:

• Moments after each "remember…", Kenzy compares the new fact against similar ones from the same person at the same tier. Restatements merge; corrections supersede ("the plumber is Sam now" retires "the plumber is Joe").
• Private facts don't ride to a cloud model. If your language model is a cloud provider, private-tier facts are withheld from the model's context and from consolidation — they still answer by voice (the instant fast path needs no model), and they consolidate once a local model is configured. Shared and about-them facts, being household-visible by design, still inject. (memory.private_to_cloud: true opts out of the protection.)
• Superseded facts leave recall instantly but stay on disk for 30 days (memory.superseded_keep_days) before a maintenance sweep removes them — so a wrong merge is recoverable.
• An hourly no-model sweep handles the mechanical rest: exact duplicates, expired facts, old tombstones. Every removal is logged.

Seeing and managing it — the dashboard

The People tab is memory's admin surface: each person's page lists what Kenzy holds for them (with tier, age, and per-fact Forget), the People page carries Household memory and a search across every fact, and each person's Privacy & data section covers the bigger hammers:

• Export their data — one downloadable file: their person record, voice profile info, and every remembered fact. The "what does Kenzy know about me" answer, in writing.
• Don't remember… — the per-person opt-out toggle. Kenzy keeps and reads no facts about them while they stay a fully recognized voice for device control and questions. Asking her to remember something gets an honest "memory is turned off for you at your request." Turning it on also offers to erase what's already stored for them (facts they shared with the house stay).
• Remove completely — the guest-departure case: erases their facts, deletes their voice, removes their record, in one confirmed action. Household-shared facts they contributed stay with the house (the gate code doesn't leave with the guest).

See Dashboard → People for the full tour.

Where it lives

The ledger is a plain, human-readable text file — data/memory/facts.jsonl in the config home on the LLM service's host, one fact per line. No database, nothing leaves your machines, and it rides backups automatically. If you're curious, open it in a text editor; if a fact ever needs surgery, you can fix it there (the format is tolerant of hand edits — restart kenzy-llm afterwards).

Configuration keys (intervals, retention, disabling memory entirely) are in the LLM configuration reference.