Documentation · Quaestra.ai

User guide

Practical how-to documentation for everyday research, organisation administration, and platform operations — organised by the three roles people hold in Quaestra.ai.

Audience · Normal users

Research with your organisation’s corpus and lens.

As a reader or researcher you ask grounded questions, verify citations, manage your history, and — when your plan allows — work with personal documents. Tenant administrators curate the shared library and workspace settings for you.

Ask History My Documents Profile

Getting started

You work inside your organisation’s Quaestra.ai workspace — usually a branded hostname provided by your administrator.

  1. Open the workspace URL your organisation shared with you.
  2. Register or sign in (see below).
  3. Complete onboarding prompts if shown — persona and introduction routes help tailor first-run guidance.
  4. Land in Ask, the default research screen.
Tip

Use the ? help control (desktop) or Help in mobile navigation anytime for the organisation’s welcome message and a shortcut back to Getting Started.

Sign in & legal

Access is passwordless and organisation-controlled.

Your organisation may limit sign-in to approved email addresses. If access is restricted and your address is not approved, ask an administrator to add you.

Email code

  1. Enter your email address on the login screen.
  2. Open the one-time code sent to your inbox and enter it to continue.
  3. Accept Terms and Conditions when registering by email, if prompted.

Google or Microsoft sign-in

Where your organisation has enabled them, choose Google or Microsoft on the login screen and complete the provider flow. The same approved-address rules apply.

Cookies, Terms, and Privacy

  • Respond to the cookie consent prompt when required.
  • Re-open Terms and Privacy from Profile whenever you need them.
  • Sign out from your account menu when you finish on a shared device.

Help & onboarding

Getting Started

Open Getting Started from navigation for tenant-defined steps and links that introduce how research works in this workspace.

Persona & intro routes

First-run prompts may ask how you work and guide you into an introduction path. Administrators can later adjust your persona if needed.

Ask

Ask is where you put natural-language questions to the curated corpus. Answers stream live and stay grounded in the library.

Ask a question and verify sources

  1. Go to Ask.
  2. Type your question. Paste a formatted equation or an image of a formula — equations appear as rendered blocks in the Ask box (click a block to open an editor with a live preview). You can keep typing prose around them. Attach one or more supporting files with the paperclip or by dragging them onto the Ask box if chat attachments are enabled — each file appears as its own chip (remove any you do not need). Attached files stay as background context and are not shown as math in the chat.
  3. Submit and watch the answer stream in.
  4. Open cited sources in the integrated viewer when your organisation shows them. Zoom or download a PDF when you need the original.
  5. Continue with follow-up questions in the same conversation, or start a new conversation when the thread should stand alone.
Note

The shared Library is curated by tenant administrators — by upload, connected cloud drives, or inbound email where those paths are enabled. As a reader you open and download cited source PDFs from Ask whenever a claim points to them; you do not need to manage those ingest paths yourself.

Ask is for questions about your document library. Standalone calculations that are not related to your sources (for example 10*10, 10 x 10, or 10 * 10) are declined rather than computed — no answer is invented from the library, and a calculator is a more fitting tool for those.

Modes, filters, and follow-ups

  • Peer Reviewed Only — limit grounding to documents marked peer-reviewed, when available.
  • Go Deep — when your organisation enables it, use deeper research mode (the label is administrator-defined).
  • Quest — when your organisation enables it, turn this on in the same row as Go Deep. Quest writes a sourced report from several searches, then starts a normal conversation you can follow up in Ask. It cannot be combined with Go Deep, the web, or attachments. It respects Peer-Reviewed Only and your organisation’s guiding principles (History shows which route shaped the report when that indicator is available). Questions about the most frequent topics or themes across the library are answered from the summary of every document in scope rather than a handful of passages, and note how emphasis shifts across years. When a search finishes without everything it needed, the answer notes what is still sought. History marks these answers as Quest.
  • Document / author selection — narrow the corpus when your organisation exposes those controls.
  • Suggested questions — pick from the Question Bank on the welcome surface when shown.
  • Follow-up chips — continue from generated next questions when enabled for your audience.
  • Explain selection — highlight part of an answer (including equations), choose Explain this, read the explanation in a popup, then continue in Ask as a new conversation that keeps the original turns and adds the explanation as the next turn. When you highlight a formula, the underlying math text is used so the explanation stays faithful to the equation.
  • Guiding Principle indicator — see which expert lens shaped the answer.
  • Context indicator — when shown, watch how much prior conversation is still in play.
  • Web-aware answers — on plans that include web search, and when the model allows it, answers may draw on the open web in addition to your corpus.
  • Math verification — when enabled for your audience, open Verify calculations to recompute steps with live inputs, Export to Excel for a live workbook, and — when your organisation also enables formal proof export — Export Lean proof for a machine-checkable formal artefact you verify independently. When the answer names a known formal result, a Results used section lists the statement and the hypotheses you should confirm.
  • Numbered equations — when you ask about a labelled formula such as Eq. (2.19), answers prefer that equation and can cite it by number and page.
  • Generated files — download any files returned with an answer.

Rate answers and retry

  1. Mark an answer helpful or unhelpful.
  2. Optionally choose a structured reason and leave a short comment.
  3. Change or clear a previous rating if your view changes.
  4. After an unhelpful rating, choose to retry with the organisation’s Powerful Model when that option is configured.

Infographic generation

When administrators enable infographics for your audience, generate a downloadable image from an answer, watch status until it is ready, then download it for presentations or notes.

History

History keeps your research threads organised and exportable.

  • Search across questions and responses.
  • Filter by thumbs-up or thumbs-down ratings.
  • Browse with infinite scrolling; conversations group into threads.
  • Open a full multi-turn conversation, rename it, or continue it in Ask.
  • Delete a single question, a whole thread, or all history (typed confirmation required for delete-all).
  • Rate answers from History as well as from Ask.
  • Review metadata such as model, routing, source, and web-search indicators when shown. Organisation admins and testers can copy a query ID from each answer to match it with Telemetry and the MCP event log.

Share & export

Share

Create a controlled public link, send by email, or copy formatted text / LaTeX. Recipients can view the share, then Claim, Join, or Continue after sign-in.

Export

Export aggregate History as CSV or PDF. Export a conversation as CSV, Excel, PDF, or Word — choose full conversation or selected turns where offered.

My Documents & Virtual Review

Available when your plan includes personal documents (admins and testers always have access).

  1. Open My Documents from navigation.
  2. Upload private documents and wait until processing shows ready. If you add a file you already have in My Documents, it is skipped and you see a message naming the existing file, with a link back to My Documents.
  3. Use ready personal documents alongside the shared corpus when asking questions.
  4. Run Virtual Review against the organisation’s shared expert lens.
  5. Export the review as PDF or Word.
  6. Delete your own documents when you no longer need them.
Privacy

Personal documents are yours. They are ownership-checked and kept separate from the organisation’s shared Library.

Q&A digests

Opt into daily and/or weekly email summaries of questions you asked in the web app or on mobile, with short answer previews and links back to the conversation. Questions asked through Integrations or Alexa are not included. Equations in those questions and answers appear as formulas in the email. If you have been inactive, a re-engagement note may include suggested questions from the Question Bank.

  • Manage preferences in Profile.
  • Send yourself a test digest from Profile.
  • Unsubscribe from any digest email with a one-click confirmation flow.

Profile & subscriptions

Account

  • See your email and member-since date.
  • Toggle daily and weekly digests.
  • Delete your account with typed DELETE confirmation. Your user record is removed or anonymised; existing Q&A history may be retained without your email association.

Subscription

  • View current plan, daily quota (or unlimited), queries used today, and reset timing.
  • Compare plans and self-serve checkout, billing portal, cancel, and resume where enabled.
  • For pay-as-you-go plans, review usage and estimated cost when shown.

Integrations (MCP Access)

When your plan includes MCP Access, open Profile → Integrations for the server address, copyable client configuration, and a browser-based authorisation flow so approved external tools can use your research workspace without you managing a long-lived secret by hand.

If personal documents are also available on your account, connected tools can list your ready My Documents and ask questions that appraise those files against the organisation’s shared Library — the same dual-scope research you get in Ask. Upload new PDFs under My Documents in the web app first; the integration lists and asks about them but does not upload.

When your organisation allows Quest for your role, connected tools can request Quest the same way you can in Ask.

When math verification and formal proof export are enabled, connected tools can export formal-proof source for an answer you own and look up curated formal statements with their hypotheses.

Amazon Alexa

When your organisation allows Alexa for your role (Admin → Alexa: Admin & Tester or All Users) and — for regular users — your plan includes Alexa Access, you use the shared Quaestra.ai Alexa skill — your organisation does not create its own skill. The Assistant Name from Admin → Configure App (the same name shown in chat) brands spoken replies and lets you address your organisation inside the skill. Admins and testers can link when organisation visibility includes them, without needing Alexa Access on a plan.

  1. Install or open the Amazon Alexa app on your phone (same Amazon account as your Echo).
  2. Enable the shared Quaestra.ai skill in the Alexa app (your organisation does not publish its own skill).
  3. In Quaestra.ai, open Profile → Integrations and choose Generate pairing code.
  4. In the Alexa app, open the Quaestra.ai skill and start Link Account. Type the pairing code on the Quaestra.ai screen on your phone — you do not speak the code to the Echo. The code expires in about ten minutes and can be used once.
  5. Ask by voice, for example: “Alexa, ask Quaestra what is momentum theory”, or open the skill and say “ask Ricardo what is momentum theory” using your Assistant Name.
  6. Say new chat to start a fresh conversation, or keep asking follow-ups to continue the current thread.
  7. To use another organisation, generate a pairing code while signed into that account, then say “link organisation” and the code inside the skill. Say “list organisations” to hear your linked names.
  8. Open History on the web to review, rename, continue, or export those conversations — they appear alongside your other Ask activity.

Alexa reads a short spoken summary prepared for voice when the answer is ready quickly. Longer research may take a moment: Alexa says it is researching and asks you to say continue in a few seconds — then it reads the answer. The full written answer also appears in History (and on the Alexa card when spoken). Detailed math and source lists are not read aloud as a long citation list.

To disconnect this organisation, use Unlink Alexa under Profile → Integrations, or unlink the skill in the Alexa app.

Product feedback

  1. Open the feedback control (label is set by your organisation).
  2. Write your message; optionally allow the organisation to contact you.
  3. Attach images if helpful, then submit without leaving the workspace.

Mobile & tablet

The research workspace is responsive. Navigation adapts on smaller screens, and Ask and History are touch-friendly so you can continue research away from a desk.

Quaestra.ai

Bring your corpus. Keep your edge.