Chatting With Your Data

Ask questions and get grounded answers with citations from your documents.

Chatting With Your Data

The Chat page is the primary way to query your knowledge base. BodhAI retrieves relevant passages from your indexed documents and uses them to generate a grounded answer with citations.

Asking a question

  1. Go to Chat in the sidebar
  2. Type your question in the input box and press Enter
  3. BodhAI retrieves relevant chunks from your documents, then streams an answer
  4. Each answer includes source citations naming the source document and section it drew from

How answers are generated

BodhAI uses hybrid retrieval — combining dense semantic search and keyword (BM25) search, then re-ranking results before passing them to the language model. This means you get accurate results even when your question uses different phrasing than the document.

The language model only answers from the retrieved content. If the answer is not in your documents, BodhAI says so rather than hallucinating.

Retrieval respects access control: answers only draw from documents in groups you belong to. If relevant content exists that you cannot access, the answer shows a "Some content was restricted" notice with a button to request access.

Watching the assistant work

Each answer includes a collapsible reasoning panel ("Thought for a moment") showing the assistant's step-by-step working — which tools it ran and in what order. Useful for checking how an answer was assembled, not just what it says.

Citations

Every answer references the documents it drew from. Citations name the source document and section directly in the answer text (e.g. Maintenance_Manual.pdf §6.4) — they are plain text, not clickable links to a document viewer.

Follow-up questions

BodhAI maintains conversation context within a session. You can ask follow-up questions without repeating context:

"What is the torque spec for the M12 bolt?" "What about M10?" ← BodhAI understands this refers to torque spec

Conversations are saved and can be reopened later — see Chat History.

Slash commands: skills and templates

Type / in the chat input to open the command menu. From it you can pick a skill (a saved instruction set the assistant follows for the turn) or a document template (an org DOCX template to fill when generating a document). Keep typing to filter by name; the selection appears as a token in the input, and Backspace removes it.

Generating documents

The assistant can also produce downloadable files — Word, Excel, PDF, or Markdown — built from your knowledge base, shown as download cards in the answer. See Document Generation.

Agentic queries

For complex multi-step questions — comparing across documents, summarising a category, or answering questions that require reasoning over multiple sources — BodhAI automatically runs an agentic workflow, chaining several tools (knowledge-base search, spreadsheet queries, graph search, document generation). These take longer (30 seconds to a few minutes) and show a progress indicator while running.

Tips for better answers

  • Be specific — "What is the coolant flush interval for the CNC-400 machine?" works better than "maintenance schedule"
  • Name the document if you know it — "According to the pump manual, what..." helps BodhAI narrow retrieval
  • Ask in your language — BodhAI's embedding model is multilingual; Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, and other Indian languages work