Connect an external AI to an active World over the API or MCP

What this is for

Point an assistant or an agent at an active World over the API or MCP, so the knowledge a compile produced answers questions outside this product.

Before you start

Sources: PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, ODT, ODS, ODP, JPG, PNG, TIF or GIF. Every one of them is sanitized to PDF and read by OCR before anything else happens.

Tables and formulas are not extracted as tables: a figure arrives as the paragraph it was printed in, with the page and the box it sat in, so a number is readable and the grid that arranged it is not. Heading levels, sections and columns are not recovered as typed structure; what the compiler receives is a paragraph and where it sat. TAVONEL processes sources up to 5 MB and 80 pages.

A compile produces a candidate, and a candidate becomes an active World only when a person activates it in the workspace. That step needs a paid plan: the Developer plan, if you are the workspace owner, or the Team plan, which is sold through a conversation today rather than self-serve checkout. A free evaluation can upload, compile, review and export; its activation request is refused, so decide the plan before you plan the run.

You need an active World, a key with the read scopes, and the collection id. There is no World discovery call in the published contract: the id is copied out of the workspace by hand, and this page does not pretend otherwise. An external model or client of your own may bring its own account and its own charges.

What a free evaluation includes, and what a page costs, are on the pricing page. This page does not restate either, so it cannot disagree with them.

Running it in code

The MCP section lists the server, the tools it exposes and the scopes each one needs; the World and Ask sections carry the plain HTTP equivalents.

The exact contract: MCP in the documentation.

Where this stops

A connected client reads the active World, so a question asked before a person activates a candidate reads the previous revision or nothing at all. A web chat that only accepts local files is not a client that can reach this API.

The reading limits under "Before you start" apply to this recipe too.

Next action

Read the MCP section and the World API section, generate a key from the developers page if your plan includes one, and check which plan reaches activation before you build against it.

Run and revision information

Every section above describes what the product does today, and the revision of this guide is printed at the foot of the page. A verified run date appears there only once a person has recorded a run, never on an edit to this page.

What a recorded run will add

The actual input — The document set the run used, published from a corpus cleared for redistribution.

Following it on screen — A capture of the workspace screens as the run passed through them, recorded rather than staged.

What the run produced — The files, tables and drafts the run produced, as it produced them.

Checking it against the source — The source location behind each value, opened at the page and the region it came from.

Using the result outside TAVONEL — The result an external consumer read back from the same World, verified on its own run.

Measured effect — Quality, time, cost and human effort, from a same-condition measurement of that run.