Asking a question

Type a question

Type in the box at the bottom of the Chat screen and tap Send. Plain questions work: "what does Marcus Aurelius say about anger?". So do exact phrases: "pillar of salt". The app searches in two ways at once, by meaning and by exact wording, so it finds a quoted phrase and a paraphrase of it.

While the app works, the box is disabled and Send becomes a Stop button. Tap Stop to cancel the search or the answer.

Choose where to search

The Scope picker narrows a question to part of the library. You find it in the sidebar on iPad and Mac, and in Settings, under Corpus, on iPhone.

Scope	Searches
all	Every book and every diary.
gutenberg	The books only.
diary	The diaries only.
A genre, such as philosophy or horror	That genre only.

Narrowing the scope is the most useful change you can make. A small language model can read only a few passages at once, so a search across every book spreads them thin, and a search of the right genre spends them all where the answer is.

The scope is remembered when you close the app. A question asked with a scope other than all shows the scope as a small tag beside it.

Start from a suggestion

An empty chat offers five questions. Each carries a tag naming the part of the corpus it searches. Tapping one asks it at once, with that scope, without changing your own scope setting.

Tag	Question
sacred-texts	pillar of salt
world-literature	circles of Hell
diary	descriptions of the Great Fire of London
philosophy	the categorical imperative and moral duty
horror	a monster assembled from dead body parts

Ask again

Ask again runs the same question again with your current settings. It sits under each question, and on a long press (or a right-click on a Mac) of the question itself. Use it after you change the scope, the engine, or a search or synthesis setting, to see what the change did. The answers from before stay in the chat, so you can compare.

Chats

Each conversation is saved on the device. See Your chats.