Answer a support question from your own manuals

What this is for

Turn a set of product manuals into answers a support engineer can send, with the passage behind each answer open beside it.

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.

Manuals are the friendliest corpus for this product and the one most likely to be a scan. A scanned page the reader cannot read fails visibly and is opened for review; nothing guesses at handwriting or a degraded scan.

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 same Ask contract as the grounded-figure recipe, plus the lexical search route when a support tool needs the passages rather than a drafted answer.

The exact contract: Ask in the documentation.

Where this stops

An answer is grounded in the manuals that were compiled, so a question about a model you did not upload has no sources behind it. Ask declines when nothing matched the question; it does not judge whether what matched is enough.

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

Next action

Read the Ask section of the docs for the exact request and response, open the read-only sample to see the evidence view, or talk to us about a corpus of your own.

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.