Experts remember things so every conversation doesn’t start from scratch. The question is what they remember and who can see it. In Portable, that’s up to you—and this page explains exactly how.
An expert’s memory is like a notebook. You decide what goes in, where the notebook lives, and who else can read it.
When you chat with an expert, it takes notes about what matters, so the next time you talk, it doesn’t ask you the same questions again. Over time, those notes become the expert’s working knowledge of you, your team, your family, or your business.
But different notes belong in different notebooks. A detail about you belongs in a notebook that follows you. A detail about your team belongs in a notebook that stays with the team. A detail you only want one expert to know belongs in that expert’s private notebook. And sometimes you want a conversation where no one takes notes at all. Portable makes those distinctions for you, and gives you the dials to adjust them.
Every memory has a home.
Behind the scenes, every note an expert takes is tagged with a scope—one of four. The scope is what decides where the memory can travel and who can reach it.
Things about you as a person—your preferences, your routines, your family, your health. Stays attached to you, not to any workspace.
Things about the workspace itself—the team, the family, the school—that any expert in that workspace can see. Doesn't cross account boundaries.
Small details that only one expert needs to do its job well—other experts don't see these, even inside the same workspace.
When Cone of Silence is on, nothing from that chat ever gets remembered elsewhere, and that chat only reads memories it formed itself. Full isolation in both directions.
The hard guarantees.
If you tell an expert something about yourself in one account, only you see it, even if other people share that account. Your coworker, your partner, your kid, your teammate: none of them can reach your personal memories by chatting with the same expert.
When you switch accounts, your personal memories follow the same expert only if you’ve shared that expert into the new account. If you haven’t, nothing travels.
A memory formed in your family account is never visible in your team account, and vice versa—even though you’re in both. Accounts are hard walls. The workspace owns its own notebook, and that notebook doesn’t leave the building.
The only way information moves between accounts is if you explicitly share an expert from one to the other, and even then, only memories that expert can legitimately reach come along.
What this looks like on a real day.
Four scenarios most users run into. Each one shows what gets remembered, where the memory lives, and what happens next.
You're chatting with your Naming expert about baby names. You audition “Oswald,” “Declan,” “Omar.” The expert remembers.
Later, in your team-at-work account, a coworker asks your naming expert “what do you know about Justin?” Your naming expert has nothing to say about baby names. That memory belongs to you, not to the workspace, and not to anyone else.
You and your partner both use Santa. You tell Santa about a surprise gift idea for your kid. Santa writes it down.
Your partner can ask Santa about gift planning and get the right answer. The memory does not appear in your personal chats, your team account, or anyone else's account. It stays in the family.
Your team has a shared brand expert. On a creative review, someone drops a note about pricing strategy for a specific lead.
Any teammate working on that lead can see the note. It does not appear in your personal account, your family account, or a different company's workspace—even if the same expert lives in both.
You flip Cone of Silence on before a therapy session with your Coach expert. You talk through a family matter.
Nothing you said surfaces anywhere else—not in other chats, not in the audit console for other surfaces, not in your daily summary. And the chat itself only reads from memories it formed here; it won't reach back into your other conversations either.
Every dial, in one place.
The defaults are conservative. Nothing is shared unless you say so. Here are the adjustments you can make when you want to open things up, lock things down, or take a look at what an expert can actually reach.
Two independent switches: whether this expert contributes what it learns to a shared pool, and whether it can read from one. Off by default means the expert keeps to itself.
Bring your personal expert (say, Santa) into your family account. The same expert in two places, with a handshake you control and can revoke anytime.
A hard bubble around one conversation. What's said there never seeds future chats, and the chat reads only from its own memories. Use it for anything sensitive.
When more than one human is in a chat, memories formed there only resurface when those same people are present again. Nothing about your group trip leaks into a 1:1.
Pick any source expert and any target expert or account. See exactly what would be reachable, with the full permission chain spelled out step by step.
Prefer to host your memories yourself? Point Portable at your own Pinecone, Qdrant, or Chroma. Your experts still work the same; the memories just live where you want them.
Sourced, or silent.
Even with the right memory in front of it, an expert has rules about how to use it. We wrote these into every expert’s instructions, and they run every time.
Cite the source.
When an expert says something about a person, it has to name where it learned that—a specific memory, a specific document, a specific conversation. No invented backstory.
Decline cleanly when it doesn’t know.
If the expert doesn’t have much on a subject, it says so. It doesn’t pad. It would rather admit a small amount of sourced information than assemble a confident-sounding dossier from scraps.
Flag cross-context sources.
If the only thing the expert has about a person came from a different conversation or a different workspace, it calls that out (“I have this from another conversation…”) rather than presenting it as neutral knowledge.
Don’t build composite portraits.
Experts answer the actual question. They don’t stitch together home, health, family, and finances into a profile. Breadth is a tell for invention, and they’re trained to be suspicious of themselves.
On our servers, or on yours.
By default, Portable hosts your experts’ memories on our infrastructure, encrypted at rest, and only ever reachable through the same scope rules described on this page.
If you’d rather own the storage yourself—for compliance, for preference, for peace of mind—turn on Bring Your Own Memory in your account settings and point Portable at your own Pinecone, Qdrant, or Chroma. The experts still work the same. The notebook just sits on a shelf you own.
Zero setup. Scope rules and encryption at rest handled for you. Works on every surface (web, Slack, browser extension, MCP, email).
Your Pinecone, Qdrant, or Chroma instance. Portable reads and writes through your credentials. Same scope rules apply on top—you own the storage, we still enforce the boundaries.
Safe by default. Transparent when we’re not.
We build Portable the way we’d want our own families, colleagues, and companies to use it. That means conservative defaults, explicit controls, and a willingness to say when we’ve gotten something wrong.
When we find a memory-handling bug—even a small one—we investigate it, fix it, and write it up. Our incident reports are detailed, they name the people involved when we have their consent, and they describe exactly what changed and why. If you’re ever affected by one, we tell you.
If you think you’ve found a privacy or memory issue, email privacy@portable.expert. We read every one, and we respond quickly.
See it for yourself.
The memory audit in Settings lets you pick any two experts or accounts and walk the full permission chain, step by step. It’s the same view our engineering team uses.