AI Meeting Assistant With Memory: Context That Carries Over (2026)

Why most meeting tools forget

Most meeting tools are built around a single session. Something listens, something transcribes, and at the end you get a summary. The file is complete, the tool has done its job, and the next meeting opens on a blank page.

The other person in that meeting is not working from a blank page. They remember that you promised a revised scope. They remember their finance lead’s objection from three weeks ago, and they remember that you never really answered it. You are the only one in the room starting over.

Two different kinds of memory are missing there, and they get confused with each other constantly.

The first is memory of you. Your job title, the product you sell, the degree you are halfway through. None of that changes between Tuesday and Thursday, but most tools make you restate it every time, or never let you state it at all.

The second is memory of this relationship. What this client bought last year, what the job description actually asks for, which chapter the course is on. That changes, but it changes on the timescale of the engagement, not the meeting.

Hedy splits context along exactly that line.

Two layers: what stays and what changes

Hedy has two context layers, and they answer different questions.

Session Context covers what stays true about you no matter who the conversation is with. You write it once, save it as a custom context, and reuse it everywhere. Hedy draws on it when it generates Automatic Suggestions during a session, and again when it writes the summary afterward.

Topic Context is attached to a Topic and applies automatically to every session inside it. It carries what is specific to one engagement. You set it on the Topic, not on the session, so every meeting in that Topic inherits it without any setup.

When a session belongs to a Topic, Hedy applies both layers at once. The rule of thumb from the help article is the fastest way to decide where something belongs: if you would end up copying the same information into several different Topics, it belongs in the Session Context instead.

That test resolves most of the ambiguous cases. Your certifications go in Session Context, because they matter in every interview. The panel interviewing you on Thursday goes in that company’s Topic Context, because they will never appear anywhere else.

What this looks like in practice

The shape is the same in all three: one thing you write once, one thing you write per engagement.

The job seeker

Session Context: your resume, the kind of role you are targeting, the two or three achievements you want to be able to reach for under pressure, and how you prefer to talk about the gap in 2024. This is true whether you are interviewing at a bank or a startup.

Topic Context, one Topic per company: the job description, what you know about the team, the names and roles of the people on the panel, and what happened in the screening call.

By the fourth round with the same company, the Topic holds every conversation you have had with them. Hedy can reference the earlier rounds during a live session, so when someone asks a question the hiring manager already asked in round two, you know it, and you know what you said.

The consultant

Session Context: your practice, the services you sell, your typical engagement model, the frameworks you use, and how you price. It does not change between clients.

Topic Context, one Topic per client: the signed scope, what phase the work is in, the internal politics you have picked up on, the client’s own terminology, and the two deliverables that are late and why.

The split earns its keep here. You are not rewriting your practice description for the eleventh client, you are writing four sentences about the eleventh client.

The student

Session Context: your degree, your year, your background in the subject, and what you are trying to get out of your classes.

Topic Context, one Topic per course: the syllabus, the reading list, the assessment structure, and the professor’s stated priorities.

Lectures for one course accumulate in one Topic, which is what makes questions like “what has she said about the final so far” answerable at all. The Topic-level chat spans every lecture in the course, not just the one you are sitting in.

What context costs you

Context is work. Somebody has to write it, and that somebody is you.

The writing itself is small and front-loaded. A useful Session Context takes maybe fifteen minutes the first time, and a Topic Context is usually a document you already have, pasted in, plus a few sentences of your own. Maintaining it is the part people underestimate.

A stale Topic Context is worse than no Topic Context. If the Topic still says the deal is stuck in procurement, and procurement signed off a month ago, Hedy will keep steering the conversation around an obstacle that no longer exists. An empty Topic just leaves Hedy working from the conversation in front of it, which is a lower ceiling but not a wrong one. Bad context actively misleads.

The practical rule:

Keep Session Context short and true. Update Topic Context when the engagement changes, not before every meeting.

The trigger is a change of phase, not the arrival of another meeting. The deal moves stages, the brief gets rewritten, the client hires a new head of product, the course moves into its second half. Those are worth two minutes. A regular Tuesday is not.

If you find yourself editing a Topic Context every week, the Topic is probably too broad. Split it.

How to write context that earns its place

The limit is 20,000 characters, roughly 3,000 words, per context. Almost nobody runs into it. What limits a context in practice is your own judgement about what will change Hedy’s behavior.

Say who the recurring people are, in prose. This is the thing most people are missing. Without it, Hedy has to infer relationships from what it hears, and it can get them backwards. The example in the help article is one that comes up often: someone capturing their mother’s medical appointments finds Hedy describing the mother as the daughter. Write one sentence per person, name the relationship, and include the nicknames people actually say out loud, because that is what Hedy hears. Prose works better than a table here. Hedy reads context as text, so state the relationship rather than implying it through formatting.

Put people in the right layer. Family, your own team, anyone who shows up across many different conversations goes in Session Context. A client’s staff or a hiring panel goes in that engagement’s Topic Context.

Spell out the words nobody spells right. Uncommon company names, product names, internal acronyms. Putting them in your context tells Hedy what they are. (If the problem is specifically transcription spelling, there is a dedicated custom vocabulary feature for that.)

State what you are trying to achieve, not just who you are. “I am a Product Manager” tells Hedy your title. “I lead cross-functional meetings with engineering and marketing, and I need to translate technical constraints for non-technical stakeholders” tells Hedy what kind of suggestion is useful to you.

Cut anything that will not change what Hedy says. Length is not the goal. If a sentence would not alter a single suggestion, it is taking up room and attention.

Set a default. One of your saved contexts can be the default, so it is already selected when the app opens. If you have a context you use eighty percent of the time, make it that one. And when a session genuinely has no relevant background, “No Context” is a real option, which is what you want for a quick scratch capture.

Contexts sync across your devices, so what you write on your laptop is there on your phone.

How this compounds

Writing context is the setup. What you get back shows up once sessions start stacking up inside a Topic.

Every session in a Topic starts with prep notes: outstanding commitments from previous meetings, questions you noted to ask, and follow-ups still open. There is no button to press, they are simply there when the session starts. We wrote about how that works in more detail in the Topic Insights post.

Each Topic also has its own chat, which you can query without a session running. “What dates did we land on?” “Has she committed to a number yet?” It searches every session in the Topic. Post-Session Chat does the same thing scoped to a single conversation, which is the right tool when you know which meeting the answer is in.

And the moments you want to keep get pulled out as Highlights rather than staying buried in a transcript you will never reopen.

None of that works without the grouping underneath it, which is the argument for using Topics at all, even before you write a single line of Topic Context. Grouping the sessions is what gives cross-session context something to reach across. Writing the context is what stops Hedy from having to guess at the parts that were never said out loud.

Every plan includes Topics. Free accounts get one Topic with all of its features, and one saved context profile. Pro lifts both limits and adds chat across all your Topics at once. The pricing page has the rest.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Session Context and Topic Context in Hedy?

Session Context covers what stays true about you no matter who the conversation is with: your role, your resume, what you sell. You save it once and reuse it everywhere. Topic Context is attached to a Topic and applies automatically to every session inside it, carrying what is specific to one engagement: a client, a deal, a job description, a course. When a session belongs to a Topic, Hedy uses both layers together.

How much context can I give Hedy?

There is a 20,000 character limit for context content, which is roughly 3,000 words. That is more room than most people need. A useful Session Context is usually a few paragraphs, and a Topic Context is usually the engagement’s defining document plus a short note on where things stand.

Does Hedy remember previous meetings?

Within a Topic, yes. Sessions grouped into a Topic can draw on each other, so during a live session Hedy can reference what was said in earlier sessions in the same Topic. Each Topic also has its own chat you can query at any time, and every session that belongs to a Topic opens with prep notes covering outstanding commitments, questions you noted, and follow-ups from last time.

Do I need to set up context before every meeting?

No. That is the point of the split. Session Context is written once and stays selected between sessions, and Topic Context is attached to the Topic, so every session inside it inherits the context without any setup. You only touch context when something actually changes, such as a new role or a new phase of a project.

Can Hedy get confused about who people are?

It can, if you do not say who they are. Without that, Hedy has to infer relationships from what it hears, and it can get them backwards. Someone capturing their mother’s medical appointments may find Hedy describing the mother as the daughter. Write one plain sentence per person naming the relationship, and include the nicknames people actually use out loud, since that is what Hedy hears.

Is context available on the free plan?

Yes. Free accounts get one saved context profile and one Topic, with all of that Topic’s features, including Topic Context, topic chat, and prep notes. Pro removes both limits: multiple saved context profiles, unlimited Topics, and chat that reaches across all of them at once.