---
title: 'Features'
description: 'Key features and capabilities of Honcho'
icon: 'star'
---

This page is a quick overview of the features within Honcho. In-depth
guides are available for each feature in the [Spellbooks - Design Patterns](../../guides/overview#design-patterns) section.

### Local vs Global Representation
Peers in Honcho are abstract entities that can represent humans, agents, or NPCs. Honcho has a two-layer approach to forming representations of Peers.
- **Global Representation**: Representation owned by a Peer that is constructed from everything the Peer has sent within Honcho.
- **Local Representation**: The representation that a Peer forms of other Peers, based on the messages those other Peers have sent (as observed by the Peer forming the representation).
- At the Session level, you can configure which Peers are able to observe messages from other Peers in that Session. This determines which Peers form representations of others within the Session.

### Ingest Arbitrary Data
To facilitate the construction of a Peer's global representation, Honcho is able to ingest arbitrary data to a Peer by adding messages to the Peer directly, outside of the context of a Session. 
- Currently, Honcho supports the ingestion of arbitrary text data.

### Queue Status
To help developers understand when a Peer's representation is fully up to date, Honcho exposes the ability to poll the status of Peer-centric queues that construct representations. 
- If no Session is specified, the queue status reflects pending work for the Peer's global representation.
- If a Session is specified, the queue status reflects pending work for the Peer's working representation in that Session.

### Search
Honcho supports full-text search across message content across different scopes. 
- You can search within a specific Session, Peer, or across all messages in a Workspace. 
- Search results are ordered by relevance, making it easy to quickly retrieve important past messages.

### Scoped API Keys
Builders can create scoped API keys to control access to different resources within Honcho.
- **Workspace-Level Keys**: Access to everything scoped to a Workspace.
- **Peer-Level Keys**: Access to everything scoped to a Peer.
- **Session-Level Keys**: Access to everything scoped to a Session.

### Get Context 
Honcho provides a powerful context retrieval feature that delivers formatted conversation context from sessions, making it easy to integrate with LLMs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and others.
- By default, the context includes a blend of summary and messages which covers the entire history of the session. 
- Summaries are generated automatically at intervals, and recent messages are included based on your specified token budget for the context.
- You can set any token limit, and if you prefer, you can disable summaries so that the context consists entirely of the most recent messages up to your chosen limit.