> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.seasonlabs.co/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# When to use Era

> Understand where live user context helps and where it does not.

Era is useful when the meaning of a message depends on the conversation around
it.

For example, “did I miss it?” could be a casual question or an urgent request.
Era summarizes the user's goal and urgency so your agent can respond
appropriately.

## Good use cases

* **Support:** detect urgency, frustration, and the user's unresolved goal.
* **Sales and shopping:** tell browsing, comparing, and deciding apart.
* **Companions and consumer agents:** respond to the user's current mood and
  intent.
* **Long conversations:** keep the user's main goal clear as the history grows.

## Poor use cases

* One-off prompts with no conversation.
* Stateless lookup or transformation tools.
* Workflows where your code already knows the exact next action.
* Applications that cannot send conversation text to the Era service.

## What changes

\| Without Era | With Era |
\| --- | --- | --- |
\| The model infers intent from raw history. | The model also receives an explicit goal, intent, and recommendation. |
\| Important signals can be buried in older messages. | Era re-summarizes the live situation each turn. |
\| You build classifiers and prompt rules yourself. | You add one `turnContext()` call. |

Era does not replace your model, conversation history, or memory system. It
adds a compact context block to the system prompt you already use.

## Examples

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Racing series fan companion" icon="flag-checkered" href="/use-cases/fan-companion">
    Turn an ambiguous question into a direct answer.
  </Card>

  <Card title="E-commerce shopping companion" icon="cart-shopping" href="/use-cases/ecommerce">
    Recognize when a product question is really a purchase objection.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>