Ask AI — question your vault, in place or across everything

Your notes answer questions your memory can't. Ask is Thoute's way of putting a question to your own vault — and getting an answer grounded in your actual bullets, with sources you can click, never a generic chatbot reply.

There are three places to ask, one for each kind of question:

Surface	Best for	Where
The Ask lens	"What did I decide about…?" across the whole vault	The lens strip
The Ask tab	A question about the thing you're looking at	The right-hand inspector
The /ask block	Thinking inside the outline — answers land as bullets	Type /ask on any bullet

All three require Cloud AI to be enabled for the vault (Settings → AI — off by default), and all three are steered by any AI context you've authored. Questions count against your plan's monthly AI allowance.

The Ask lens

Open Ask from the lens strip and type a question in plain language — "what's blocking the kitchen renovation?", "when did I last talk to Priya about pricing?"

Thoute searches your vault on your device first — keyword and meaning-based — picks the most relevant bullets and attachment excerpts, and sends only those to the model. The answer comes back as prose with numbered citations; click any [n] to jump to the source bullet in context.

• Web search — toggle the globe to let the model also ground on a live web search, for questions that mix your notes with the outside world. Web searches have their own monthly allowance.
• Save as recall — turn a good question into a standing one that re-asks itself on a schedule.

The Ask tab

The inspector's Ask tab (right-hand panel) runs the same vault-wide pipeline, seeded from the block you're inspecting — handy presets appear for the block you have open. Scope is still the whole vault, so the answer isn't limited to what's on screen.

The /ask block

Sometimes you don't want an answer in a side panel — you want it in the outline, under the thing you're thinking about, where you can edit it, tag it, and build on it. That's the /ask block.

Type /ask on any bullet (or pick Ask AI from the / menu). The bullet becomes a prompt: write your question, press Cmd+Enter, and the answer arrives as child bullets — real, editable blocks with a subtle tint marking them as AI-written. Re-running the prompt replaces its previous answer. Earlier /ask blocks on the same page thread in as conversation history, so follow-up questions remember what came before.

Steer exactly what it sees

Every /ask block has a context chip next to the question showing what's in scope — how many bullets, attachments, and images, with a rough token estimate. Click it to choose the scope:

• Whole vault (default) — the most relevant material is retrieved from across your vault for each run, like the Ask lens.
• This page — the outline you're looking at (your current zoom), or pin it to one branch. While the prompt is focused, every bullet in scope shows a stripe down its left edge, so you can see exactly what the model will read.
• References — everything matching tags, page links, or block references you pick, wherever it lives in the vault.
• None — just your question, no notes. Pair it with web search for a clean outside-world lookup.

The scope popover also holds toggles for attachments (their extracted text rides along), images (sent to the model as pictures), and web search.

How your AI context shapes Ask

Everything in Steering AI applies to every Ask surface, automatically:

• Your vault brief grounds every question — who you are, what this vault is, how you want answers.
• Entity glossary definitions are handed over whenever a question or its sources mention a defined name or alias.
• Tag context rides along when a question involves a tag you've described.
• Page & subtree context steers how the model reads material drawn from that page or branch — including what an /ask block pulls into scope. Attach "this branch is a research log; treat each child as a source" to a subtree, and an /ask block scoped there reads it that way.

Steering is guidance, not a source: answers still come from (and cite) your actual notes; your context tells the model how to read them.

Privacy

Retrieval happens on your device. Only the bullets, excerpts, and steering context relevant to your question are sent to Thoute Cloud — our managed AI service — only when Cloud AI is enabled for the vault, and never stored in plaintext. Answers written into your outline are encrypted like everything else. See Privacy for the full model.

What's next

• Steering AI — Author the context that makes every answer yours.
• Capture — More notes in, better answers out.
• Keyboard shortcuts and syntax — The full / command list.