Ask your documents

Asking a good question

Where to find Spyral's assistant, how to phrase a question it can answer well, and what to do when it says it cannot find your document.

Spyral can answer questions from the documents your firm has uploaded. It reads them, answers in plain language, and shows you which documents each answer came from.

How you word the question changes the answer more than most people expect. This page covers where the assistant is, how to ask, and what to do when an answer comes back empty.

Finding the assistant

There is no entry for the assistant in the left sidebar. This is the thing people most often cannot find in their first week, so it is worth saying plainly.

You reach it in one of these ways:

• Open Home and use the AI Chat button in the page header. This is the normal route.
• Use the Ask the assistant a question step in the setup checklist on the home page.
• Go to /dashboard/chat directly and bookmark it.

The page itself is titled AI Assistant, and its answers are labelled Spyral AI. Those are the same thing.

What it answers from

The assistant answers from the documents your team has uploaded, and from nothing else. It cannot see another firm's documents, and no other firm can see yours.

A document only becomes available once Spyral has finished processing it. Uploading a file is not enough on its own. See Uploading documents.

Be specific

A vague question makes Spyral guess which documents you mean. A specific one points it straight at the right file.

Name the company, the financial year, the document, or the reference number.

Ask about something that is actually written down

Spyral answers from the text of your documents. If a fact was never written in a document you uploaded, it cannot be found.

There is a second effect worth knowing. A general question about accounting or Luxembourg law reads as a request for general knowledge, and Spyral will answer it from its own knowledge without opening any of your documents. You get an answer with no sources under it, which people often misread as "Spyral has lost my files".

The fix is to point the question at your own material. Say our, and name the kind of document.

Ask one thing at a time

Spyral works from a limited number of passages out of your library for each answer. A question with three parts in it splits that budget three ways, and each part gets a thinner answer.

Poor:

What is Delta S.A.'s share capital, who are its managers, and when is its filing deadline?

Better: send three separate messages, one for each. You keep the same conversation, and each answer gets the full attention of the search.

Write a sentence, not a fragment

A very short message, roughly five words or fewer, is treated as a follow-up and interpreted against what you were just talking about. That is helpful in a short exchange and unreliable in a long one, where it can attach your question to the wrong company.

When you change subject inside a conversation, name the new subject in full. If you are switching to a different client altogether, start a new conversation instead.

Narrow the search with the controls, not the sentence

Adding "in the Delta project" to your sentence is only a hint. The controls in the message box are a hard filter, and they work better.

• The folder button picks a project. Read Team conversations first: on a new chat, picking a project asks whether you want to create a shared team conversation.
• The scope dropdown limits the search to one company, to a company and everything it owns, or to a client group. The options read No scope, then Entity: followed by a company name, Ownership tree from: followed by a company name, and Group: followed by a client group name. Only companies set up in the annual accounts workspace appear here.

Agent mode

The brain icon on the right of the message box turns Agent mode on. In this mode Spyral works through a question in visible steps and looks across more documents before answering. It is slower.

Leave it off for straightforward look ups. Turn it on when you are genuinely comparing across several documents, for example "compare the going concern wording across the last three management letters for Beta Invest". Without it, that kind of question is answered from a single pass and the answer will look confident while being incomplete.

Every answer shows its sources

Under each answer, a Sources row lists the documents the answer drew on. Sources Spyral considers a weak match for your question are shown in amber with a warning icon. If every source is weak, a Low relevance results notice appears above them, telling you the answer may not be grounded in the right material.

Treat that notice as a prompt to rephrase, to narrow the scope, or to check that the document you had in mind is actually in the library.

Questions it will not answer well

• "Summarise everything we have on Alpha Holding." Spyral pulls a limited number of passages for each answer, so a request that spans a whole client file returns a confident but partial summary. Ask about one document, or attach the document you actually mean.
• Counting or totalling across the library. "How many invoices did we receive in March" is a question about your library as a whole, not about the text inside one document. Use the Library filters for that.
• Tax or legal advice. Spyral tells you what your documents say. Deciding what is correct remains your firm's judgement.
• Anything about a document that is only on your desktop. Upload it first.

Why did it not find my document?

Work through these in order.

1. The document has not finished processing. A file becomes available to the assistant only after Spyral has read it. A large scan can take a few minutes, and a file that failed to process never becomes available at all. Open the Library, find the document, and check its status. If it failed, upload it again.

2. A scope or a project is limiting the search. Check the scope dropdown and the folder button in the message box. If either is set, Spyral is only looking at part of your library. Set the scope back to No scope and ask again.

3. Your wording is not close enough to the document. Spyral matches your question against the text of your documents. If the document calls it a "convention de prêt" and you asked about a "loan agreement", the match may be too loose to surface. Ask again using the words that appear in the document itself, including the exact company name, the RCS number, or the reference on the invoice.

4. You uploaded it a moment ago. Immediately after an upload, the same question worded the same way can still return the older picture. Wait a short while, then ask again, and change the wording rather than repeating it word for word.

5. You know exactly which file it is. Stop searching and attach it. Typing @ in the message box lets you name the document directly, and Spyral then reads far more of it than a search would surface. See Referencing a specific document.

Check the answer

Spyral shows a reminder under the message box that AI answers can contain inaccuracies. That is not boilerplate. Before an answer goes into a file note, a resolution, or anything a client sees, open the source document and confirm the figure.

If something looks wrong and you cannot explain why, get in touch with us.