Echo Recognition

Problem

When the agent treats every incoming message as an independent new turn, a repeated message reads as a fresh prompt of equal weight to any other. The agent re-runs the same reasoning over slightly rearranged context and produces a near-duplicate of its previous reply, perhaps with one word changed. The user's emphasis-by-repetition becomes invisible: instead of being heard louder, they are answered again with the same answer they already rejected. The conversation either spins in place or drifts further from what the user actually wants, and the agent never registers that the repetition itself was a signal.

Solution

Maintain a small ring of recent incoming user messages with timestamps. On each new input, compute similarity to the recent ring (normalized exact match, high token overlap). On hit, do not re-run from scratch: surface the prior reply, ask 'what did I miss?' or 'I read this as emphasis — should I deepen X or pivot?'. Treat the pair (original + echo) as a single reinforced turn, weighted higher in attention.

When to use

• The agent receives messages from a human who can repeat themselves to emphasise or re-ask.
• Treating a repeat as fresh input would produce duplicate or near-duplicate replies.
• The agent has access to short-term history of the user's recent messages.