# Zep v0.17 - Summary Search and Enrichment, Scalability Improvements

By Daniel Chalef · Oct 31, 2023 · https://www.getzep.com/blog/zep-v0-17/ · Tags: Product updates

Zep now supports searching chat history summaries helping developers provide rich, succinct context to LLMs.

[Zep 0.17.0, released today](https://github.com/getzep/zep/releases), now includes the ability to search over summaries created by Zep, offering a new and powerful path to grounding your LLM apps with long-term memory.

Zep periodically generates summaries from chat histories persisted to the Zep service. A summary and a set of recent chat messages are returned when a [developer retrieves recent memory from Zep](https://docs.getzep.com/sdk/chat_history/memories/#getting-a-sessions-memory).

Before v0.17, individual chat messages could be [searched and populated into a prompt](https://docs.getzep.com/sdk/chat_history/search/). This has limitations, as vector similarity search can have poor results when chat messages are short or lack context. Think of a single one-word *yes* in answer to a question. This is important information but may not result in a vector search result.

Zep stores all historical summaries of a conversation. Now, you can search over these summaries and populate your prompt with them. Since a summary is a distillation of a conversation, they're more likely to match your search query and offer rich, succinct context to the LLM.

```typescript
import {
  MemorySearchPayload,
  NotFoundError,
  ZepClient
} from '@getzep/zep-js'

const searchPayload = new MemorySearchPayload({
  text: searchText,
  search_scope: 'summary',
  search_type: 'mmr',
  mmr_lambda: 0.5
})
const searchResults = await client.memory.searchMemory(
  sessionID,
  searchPayload,
  3
)
searchResults.forEach((searchResult) => {
  console.debug('Search Result: ', JSON.stringify(searchResult.summary?.content))
  console.debug(
    'Search Result Distance: ',
    JSON.stringify(searchResult.dist)
  )
})
```
Setting "search_scope" to "summary" returns summary matches

Zep's native support for [Maximum Marginal Relevance Re-Ranking](https://docs.getzep.com/sdk/search_query/#maximal-marginal-relevance-re-ranking) is particularly useful with summaries. Successive summaries may include similar content, with Zep's similarity search returning the highest matching results but with little diversity.

MMR re-ranks the results to ensure that the summaries you populate into your prompt are both relevant and each offers additional information to the LLM.

## Summary Enrichment with Named Entities

Zep now enriches summaries with Named Entities, similar to the enrichment already offered for individual chat messages.

![Message and summary entries with token counts, each paired with JSON of named entities, with the summary enriched by a PERSON match.](https://www.getzep.com/blog/zep-v0-17/image-1.png)

Search over summaries [can be filtered by the named entity metadata](https://docs.getzep.com/sdk/search_query/#filtering-using-metadata) added to the summary by Zep.

```typescript
const searchPayload = new MemorySearchPayload({
   metadata: {
      where: {
         and: [
            {
               jsonpath:
                  '$.system.entities[*] ? (@.Label == "WORK_OF_ART")',
            },
            {
               jsonpath:
                  '$.system.entities[*] ? (@.Name like_regex "^parable*" flag "i")',
            },
         ],
      },
   },
   text: searchText,
});
```

### Scalability Improvements

The Zep service is now entirely stateless, allowing simple scale-out of Zep instances. All background operations are now persisted in a message queue in Zep's back-end Postgres service and executed by Zep instances when available.

### Upgrading to v0.17.0

1. To upgrade Zep, pull the latest containers from Zep GitHub Package Repo. If you're using `docker compose`, you can run:

```bash
git pull
docker compose pull
```

2. Modify your configuration by adding the `entities` and `embeddings` sections under `summarizer` according to your setup.

```yaml
extractors:
  messages:
    summarizer:
      enabled: true
      entities:
        enabled: true
      embeddings:
        enabled: true
        dimensions: 384
        service: "local"
```

Alternatively, add the following variables to your environment:

```bash
ZEP_EXTRACTORS_MESSAGES_SUMMARIZER_ENTITIES_ENABLED=true
ZEP_EXTRACTORS_MESSAGES_SUMMARIZER_EMBEDDINGS_ENABLED=true
ZEP_EXTRACTORS_MESSAGES_SUMMARIZER_EMBEDDINGS_SERVICE=openai
ZEP_EXTRACTORS_MESSAGES_SUMMARIZER_EMBEDDINGS_DIMENSIONS=1536
```

Modify the above [embedding settings](https://docs.getzep.com/deployment/embeddings/) according to your requirements.

3. Upgrade Python or TypeScript SDKs to the latest available versions.

### Next Steps

- [Zep Quick Start Guide](https://docs.getzep.com/deployment/quickstart/)