I’ve spent the last months building an app that lets you ask questions about your own PDFs, documents and presentations. A few things I learned along the way, in case they help anyone working on something similar:
- People care more about privacy than features. The most common question was “do my files get uploaded?”. Keeping the files on the computer and sending only the small pieces that answer a question made people much more comfortable trying it.
- Showing a source is not the same as being right. At first, every answer showed little source numbers, and I thought that was enough. It wasn’t: sometimes the source didn’t actually say what the answer claimed. Now each sentence is checked against the exact page it cites, and if it doesn’t match, it’s marked as unsupported instead of hiding it.
- Being honest about what’s missing is a feature. An answer that says “this isn’t defined yet in your documents” is more useful than one that fills the gap with something that sounds right. I had to teach the checker the difference between “admitting a gap” and “making something up”.
- Never make people wait for the machine. If the app was still reading a big folder, you couldn’t ask anything until it finished. Now you can ask right away about whatever it has already read.
- Meetings are where people lose the most information. Being able to ask “what did we decide about the budget?” during or after a meeting turned out to be one of the most used things. I’m curious: if you use AI with your own documents, what makes you trust (or not trust) an answer? I built this as ScrapeVantageAI Desktop (Windows): Link in comments if you wanna try it submitted by /u/FreakFrakFrok
Originally posted by u/FreakFrakFrok on r/ArtificialInteligence
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