Residents chatting with a multi-turn 311 assistant find that the agent forgets what they said just a few messages earlier, forcing them to repeat themselves within the same conversation. The team traces this to how the agent handles context between invocations. Which fix directly addresses the problem?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Think of a conversation like a phone call on a bad connection that keeps dropping — the person on the other end forgets what you said two sentences ago, no matter how sharp or well-spoken they are. The fix isn't a smarter phone, it's a connection that holds. Turning on session/state persistence keeps each turn's context attached to the conversation, so the agent still has your earlier answer when you follow up.
Full Explanation
Agents don't remember anything between calls unless something explicitly carries prior turns forward as part of the invocation; enabling session and state management is what threads a resident's earlier messages into each subsequent turn so the agent can reference what was already said. A longer output token limit changes how much the agent can say in one reply, not how much of the prior exchange it can see — it does nothing for context retention. Adding more action groups expands what backend functions the agent can call mid-conversation, which is a capability upgrade unrelated to whether conversation history is retained. Swapping in a larger foundation model is a common but mistaken intuition: model size affects reasoning and generation quality, not whether the surrounding application layer is passing conversation history back in — a bigger model with no session state forgets just as fast. Scope caveat: session state typically expires after a configured idle timeout, so a resident who steps away too long will still need to restate context once the session lapses. Operational check: run a two-turn test — ask a question, then a follow-up that depends on the first answer — and confirm the second reply correctly references the first.