You finish a session with Ophie, set the phone down, and within a day the specifics blur. You remember roughly how you felt, but the one thing Ophie said that actually landed — and the small step you agreed to try — is already fading. A session summary is the part that stays put after the conversation ends. This post walks through what's in one, how to use it, and the controls you have over whether it's kept at all.
What's actually in a summary
After a session, Ophie writes a summary to your session history. The Session Summary view pulls together a few things: a transcript with the key moments highlighted, the insights and reframes that came up during the conversation, suggested follow-ups, and controls to save, export, or delete the whole thing. It's meant to be a short, honest record of what you talked about — not a clinical note, and not a diagnosis.
The reframes are worth a word. Reframing is a built-in Ophie behavior, but it follows a rule: a reframe is only offered after a feeling has been acknowledged, and it lands as an invitation you can disagree with — not a correction. So when a reframe shows up in your summary, it's there as something to consider later, not a verdict on how you should have felt.
How to use it later
The simplest use is also the most useful: come back and read it. Sitting with a written record of a stressful or emotional conversation is its own small practice. Reflective writing about difficult events has been associated with improvements in both psychological and physical health, according to a review in the Royal College of Psychiatrists' journal. A summary gives you something concrete to return to instead of a half-remembered feeling.
The second use is the suggested follow-ups. These are the small, specific next steps that surfaced in the conversation — the thing you said you'd try, the question you wanted to sit with. Reading them a few days later is a low-pressure way to check whether you actually followed through, without turning it into a chore.
Over time the summaries add up into something you can track. Your dynamic activity responses and check-ins are recorded so you can see trends in your wellbeing, and Ophie carries context across sessions — it remembers previous conversations and builds on them rather than starting cold each time. Insights like "you've been more open about work stress this week" come from that continuity, not from a single session in isolation.
A summary isn't a grade on how the session went. It's a place to leave a note for the version of you reading it next week.
You can edit what gets kept
A summary isn't fixed in place. In your post-session summary you can edit the details — adjust the title, add your own notes, or change the summary text itself. If Ophie misremembered something, or framed a moment in a way that doesn't match how you actually experienced it, you're the final word. The record should reflect your account of the session, not just the model's.
This matters because the summary is the thing Ophie draws on to remember context next time. Keeping it accurate keeps future sessions grounded in what really happened rather than a small misreading that compounds.
When you don't want it kept at all
Some things you'll want to talk through once and not carry forward. Ephemeral mode is always available for exactly that — it lets you keep details out of your profile so nothing from that session gets added to what Ophie remembers about you. Storage is configurable per session, with separate toggles for whether the transcript and the summary are kept, so you decide what persists and what disappears when the conversation ends.
When a summary iskept, it's kept the same way everything else in Ophie is: transcripts, summaries, and memories are stored as AES-256-GCM ciphertext under a key unique to your account, so a leaked database backup is unreadable without it. Your conversations are never used to train AI models — they stay in your encrypted account and are used only to help Ophie remember context across your own sessions. If you ever want the deeper version of how that works, we wrote it up in Encryption at Rest, and the plain-language data handling lives at /privacy.
Your summaries stay with you
Past Sessions gives you a searchable, filterable list of everything you've kept, with the transcript and any activity artifacts you can revisit. And these don't vanish when your plan changes: even after you run out of sessions, your summaries, insights, and activity results stay accessible from your dashboard. The same holds if you cancel — past summaries remain available through and after the billing period. If you delete your account, that's the one true exit: the encryption key is destroyed and the data becomes permanently unreadable.
Education only — Ophie is supplementary, everyday support, not a replacement for licensed care. It doesn't diagnose or treat, and it isn't for crisis or acute conditions. If you're in crisis, contact local emergency services or a crisis line (in the US, call or text 988). Ophie is for adults 18 and over.
One honest note to close on: a summary is a tool for reflection, not a substitute for talking to a person. The same review that found value in reflective writing also notes it works best alongside follow-up with someone who can support you — it isn't meant to replace face-to-face care (Royal College of Psychiatrists' journal). Ophie's summaries are built to help you reflect between conversations, and to stay yours the whole time.
References
- Cambridge University Press — Advances in Psychiatric Treatment (Royal College of Psychiatrists journal). Emotional and physical health benefits of expressive writing (2005).
Read more: Privacy · Encryption at Rest · How it works