Giving Your Chatbot Memory and Variables
A bot that forgets your name between messages feels broken. Memory is what makes a conversation feel like a conversation. In Voiceflow you store information in variables; an AI model holds short-term context within a turn. Combining both gives a bot that remembers who it is talking to and what they wanted.
Variables: the bot's notepad
Capture a value once (the user's name, their order number, their plan) into a variable, then reuse it anywhere later with curly-brace syntax. Variables persist across the whole conversation.
Conversation context for the model
When a turn calls a model, pass the recent exchange and the key variables into the prompt so its answer fits the conversation so far. You do not pass the entire history forever; you pass a rolling window plus the durable variables.
Result: a bot that greets returning context naturally, references the order being discussed, and never asks the same question twice in one session.