Context Management – Notis

Notis is designed to provide highly personalized assistance within your Notion workspace. To do this effectively, it needs to maintain an appropriate context window that balances comprehensive understanding with computational efficiency. This article explains how Notis manages its context—both cleaning outdated information and gathering relevant context when needed.

Context Cleaning

Unlike chatGPT, you cannot open a new window in your favourite message app manage to clean the context Notis uses to answer your queries. To solve this, Notis employs several sophisticated techniques to ensure its context window remains relevant and efficient.

1. Recalling previous messages

By default Notis will recall the previous messages you exchanged on the same channel.

There are a few exceptions to this rule:

Replying or citing a message on all channels will bring back the conversation history used by this particular message.

When receiving a Reminder or Recurring Instruction, the conversation history at the time it was setup is automatically used by Notis.

2. Message History Pruning

Notis keeps your conversation history organized by:

First, we enforce a hard limit of 128’000 tokens cap per request.

Then, if there is more than 10 messages in the history, we delete all messages older than 24 hours.

Finally, our triage engine examine if the user has moved to a new topic and clean the context if that’s the case.

3. New Thread Creation

The triage engine starts fresh conversations when:

It decides a fresh start would be helpful

The conversation moves to a completely different topic

You begin new tasks that don't need previous conversation history

The user specifically ask for a new conversation

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To force Notis to clear his conversation history, simply ask something along the line of “Hey, let’s start a new conversation”.

Enriching the Context

Notis works as part of a team, with a helper that gathers relevant information from your Notion workspace. This helper uses is called the context manager and use different strategies to gather that relevant context:

1. Database Lookups

When specific information is needed, Notis can query your Notion databases to:

Find information stored in your databases

Use filters to answer specific questions (like "What tasks are due this week?")

Understand how your data is organized

Find connections between different pieces of information

2. Smart Content Search

For less structured information, such as finding a needle in a haystack, Notis uses file search (RAG) to:

Find relevant content anywhere in your workspace

Gather examples to match your writing style

Find personal information that might be in various documents

No context could be found for querying your databases.

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Not only your Notion document are indexed in your private vector database so we can use file search (RAG) across your entire workspace but so is every compatible documents you stored in Notion file properties.

3. Direct Document Access

When needed, Notis can look directly at specific Notion documents to:

Get content from documents you mention

Extract detailed information from known documents

Study your document format to match your style

Look at related documents mentioned elsewhere

4. Web Information

To add outside knowledge, Notis can:

Read Websites: Look at external web content you mention

Search the Web: Use Open AI deep research or web search to find current information or verify facts

When Notis Looks for Information

Notis gathers extra information for three main reasons:

Making Connections: Finding document IDs to complete relational properties that links databases together

Matching Your Style: Looking at your previous writing to match how you write

Answering Questions: Searching for answers across your workspace

Main Benefits

This smart approach to managing information provides several advantages:

Personal Touch: Notis writes like you do by studying your content

Speed: By removing unneeded information, Notis stays fast and mimize how much usage is billed to your plan.

Complete Understanding: By gathering information in multiple ways, Notis gets a full picture of your workspace