Ask
Cited answers grounded in the content you connected.
Status: Available · Last verified: 30 July 2026
How Ask works
Ask retrieves evidence from your content and writes an answer over it, with inline numbered citations you can click through to the source.
Retrieval pulls from three places, depending on what you have connected:
- Cloud indexed content – everything indexed connectors have synced
- Live provider retrieval – for connectors that query the provider at request time
- Local content on a paired Mac – files indexed by the Mac app can be used as evidence
For a question with several parts, Ask retrieves for each part rather than doing a single lookup and hoping one pass covers everything. Citations are validated against the retrieved evidence before the answer is shown, so a citation points at something that was actually retrieved.
Citations tell you where an answer came from. They do not guarantee that the answer is correct, or that the retrieved evidence actually answers your question. Check the sources for anything consequential.
Citation previews
Clicking a citation shows a bounded excerpt from the source, with a Show more option to expand it. The excerpt is a window into the source, not the whole document – a short excerpt does not mean the source is short.
Conversations
Ask keeps conversations. Past conversations are saved and can be reopened, you can react to answers, and the current date and time are available to the model, so questions like "what changed this week" resolve against the actual date.
Models
You pick the answer model from the model picker in Settings. Two allowances apply: a standard daily allowance, and a smaller premium-model allowance that is a subset of it – premium answers count against both.
The model picker in the app is the authoritative list of what you can select. Model names are deliberately not reproduced here, because a docs page that lags the allowlist is worse than no list.
The models used internally for embedding, ranking, and classification are not user-configurable.
When Ask cannot answer well
| Situation | What happens |
|---|---|
| Nothing indexed yet | There is nothing to ground an answer in. Connect a source and let it sync first. |
| A source is unavailable | Live retrieval for that source is skipped. The answer is built from what could be retrieved, so coverage is narrower than usual. |
| Permissions changed at the provider | Retrieval uses the last synced access snapshot, so it can lag a change made at the provider until the next sync. |
| Evidence is thin or partial | The answer is built from incomplete evidence. This is exactly when reading the citations matters. |
Keyboard shortcuts
⌘K– focus input⌘N– new conversation⌘Enter– sendEsc– close panel
Limits
- 100 Ask questions per day, as a nominal cap enforced best-effort under concurrency
- 20 premium-model answers per day, as a subset of that allowance
See usage limits for the full picture.
Related
- Search – when you want the documents, not an answer
- MCP server –
get_contextreturns raw cited evidence to your own AI client instead of a written answer