Ask Your Owl: Questions Across All Your Recordings

What is Ask your Owl?

The Ask your Owl page at /ask lets you ask questions across everything you have recorded, in plain language, and get back an answer grounded in what you actually said. The subtext on the page puts it plainly: "Ask questions across all your recordings. Answers are grounded in what you actually said, with sources."

This is not a generic AI chat. InstantOwl does not guess or pull from outside knowledge. It searches your own recordings for relevant passages and writes an answer using only what it finds there.

How do I ask a question?

1. Open Ask from the navbar (on mobile, it is the first tab in the bottom bar).
2. Type your question into the composer, which reads Ask anything about your recordings….
3. Press Enter to send, or Shift+Enter if you want a new line first.
4. Watch the answer stream in, with Sources listed underneath as clickable citations.

If you are not sure what to ask, the empty state offers a few starting points, such as "What have I been thinking about lately?", "Summarize my ideas about my product.", "What decisions have I made recently?", and "Find anything I said about pricing."

How do citations work?

Every answer is backed by Sources, numbered citation chips under the response. Tap one to jump straight to the recording it came from. If you do not see a source for a claim, do not trust it. That should not happen, since the answer is built from retrieved passages in your own recordings, but the citations are there so you can always verify.

Can I ask follow-up questions?

Yes. Ask your Owl keeps recent conversation history in memory, so you can ask a follow-up like "what did I say about the budget" and then, right after, "and what about the timeline" without repeating context. This works because InstantOwl carries the last several turns of your conversation forward when it searches for an answer.

What does it search, and what does it skip?

Ask searches across all of your work recordings. It does not search:

• Archived recordings. If you have archived something in your recordings library, Ask will not find it. Unarchive it first if you want it included.
• Anything outside your own account. Answers never pull from other users' data or the open internet.

Why does it say my recordings are being indexed?

When you first open Ask, or right after adding a new recording, you may see Indexing your recordings for search… X/Y. InstantOwl builds a search index behind the scenes so it can find the right passages quickly. This usually finishes in moments. If you ask a question before indexing catches up, you may see a message asking you to wait a moment and try again.

Tips for better answers

• Be specific. "What did I say about pricing for the workshop" retrieves better passages than "pricing."
• Ask across projects freely. Ask searches everything, not just one project, so it is a good way to surface an idea you know you said out loud but cannot remember where.
• Use it before starting something new. Before a meeting or a writing session, ask what you have already said on the topic instead of digging through your recordings library manually.

Related

• Recordings library: how archiving affects what Ask can see.
• Formats: turn what you find through Ask into a new document type.
• Tasks: action items pulled automatically from your recordings.