Memory and context
AI models don’t retain memory between requests on their own. So, with every new message, Sparkian sends along your recent conversation history to keep the reply relevant to what you’ve already discussed. How much history is included, and in what form, depends on your chat settings and the selected model’s context window.
Open Chat settings from the + tools menu in the message box (or type /settings) to adjust this for the current conversation.
Context mode
Under Conversation context, choose how Sparkian handles older messages:
- Smart (default) — summarizes older messages, which can use fewer Sparks in long chats
- Exact — sends only your recent messages, exactly as written, with no summarizing
Recent messages
The Recent messages slider (0–50, default 20) works a little differently depending on the mode:
- In Exact mode, it’s a hard cap — only this many previous messages are sent.
- In Smart mode, it’s the number kept exact; Sparkian can include more than this before summarizing the rest.
Retaining more messages improves continuity but can increase the Spark cost per message, since there’s more for the model to read. See Sparks (credit system).
Personal memory
Context mode and Recent messages only apply within a single conversation. For Sparkian to remember details about you across separate chats, see Personal memory.
Long conversations
Once an active conversation reaches around 20,000 tokens, Sparkian shows a notice banner to warn you before costs increase further. Learn more in the Long context notice guide.