Make Assist remember

[nielsrowinbik]

Problem statement

Every time someone opens Assist, they start from zero. The assistant has no memory of previous conversations, no awareness of what was discussed yesterday, and no sense of continuity. For quick commands this matters less, but for ongoing management tasks, debugging across multiple sessions, or simply picking up where you left off, it is a real limitation.

Persistent sessions are part of the broader AI management vision for Home Assistant (see AI in Home Assistant vision document, TODO: Add link). Without them, every conversation is disposable. With them, the assistant starts to feel like a genuine long-term collaborator.

Community signals

• An August 2024 forum thread "Storing voice assistant (OpenAI) history" explicitly asks how to persist conversation history across Assist sessions, describing the lack of continuity as a core limitation for more complex use cases.
• A March 2025 forum thread "Why does the conversation ID change every 5 minutes?" reveals that Assist's conversation context expires after five minutes, which a user discovered while trying to build a multi-turn interaction. The poster described this as frustrating and limiting.
• The March 2026 post "Too easy to swipe away Assist window while scrolling" lists persistent conversation history as one of its proposed solutions, showing that users naturally reach for session continuity when they encounter the limits of the current dialog.
• In the "AI assistance is a home assistant coding game changer" forum post (June 2025), the author specifically highlights that they prefer Claude over ChatGPT because it "doesn't forget what you said 5 questions ago."
• This feature request is specifically asking for the feature.

Scope & Boundaries

In scope

• Session persistence tied to the authenticated user, so that conversation history is preserved across page loads and devices
• A single active session per user to start, with the ability to clear it
• Surfacing the session in the Assist UI so the maintainer can see and scroll previous exchanges

Not in scope

• Multiple named conversations (like ChatGPT or Claude's conversation list) — considered but deferred to a follow-on
• Shared or multi-user sessions
• Any changes to the assistant's capabilities or the Assist surface design

Foreseen solution

Conversation history is stored server-side and tied to the authenticated HA user. When the user opens Assist, their previous session is loaded. They can continue from where they left off or clear the session to start fresh. This works across devices as long as they are signed in. Multiple conversation support is explicitly deferred, but the architecture should not preclude it.

Risks & open questions

• Storage and data model: Conversation history can grow large. Retention limits, pruning strategies, and storage implications need to be defined.
• Privacy: Stored conversations may contain sensitive home configuration details. Users need to understand what is stored and have clear controls over it.
• Multi-user households: If multiple people use the same HA instance with different accounts, their sessions should be cleanly separated. Edge cases around shared access need consideration.
• Session architecture prerequisite: This opportunity likely depends on the non-blocking surface redesign being in place first, since a persistent session makes little sense in a dialog that discards state on close.

Appetite

Medium — 1 cycle. The main investment is the server-side session storage and the user-facing controls. The UI changes are relatively contained if the surface redesign is already done.

Execution issues

No response

Decision log

Date	Decision	Outcome