Docs / Guides

Asking your vault a question

Premium tools → 💬 Ask your vault answers questions about your own documents in plain language: when does my passport expire, what is my car insurance policy number, how much is the council tax.

How the answer is produced

Keepsake answers by looking in your documents and quoting what it finds — either a field it already extracted (expiry date, document number, issuing authority) or the sentence in the document that contains the answer. Every answer shows the document and the exact line it came from, and tapping that opens the document.

Nothing is sent anywhere. The search runs in your browser, over documents that are decrypted only in this tab.

Finding the right document

You do not have to use the words that are printed on the document. Keepsake folds and stems what you type, so policies finds a policy; it knows 27 groups of words that mean the same thing, so car insurance finds a motor policy and my will finds a last testament; and if OCR read the title as Passporl, one letter out, that still matches what you typed.

Two rules keep that from becoming guesswork:

• A word everybody's documents contain decides less than a rare one. If half your vault mentions insurance, that word cannot carry a document to the top on its own.
• Words that say what you are asking cannot pick the document. Expiry, number, amount, issuer and date describe the answer you want, not the document you want it from — so when does my drone licence expire does not come back with your passport merely because the passport has an expiry date.

On a fixed set of 22 questions over 12 documents, this puts the right document first every time; the plain word-matching it replaced managed 17. The same ranking runs on Windows, Android and the web from one shared rulebook, so the same question finds the same document wherever you ask it.

Finding a document is not the same as having an answer, though. Whatever is found still has to produce a field or a sentence that actually answers the question — otherwise you get told so.

When the answer isn't there

If your documents do not contain the answer, Keepsake says so:

• "Nothing in your vault mentions that."
• "I found Council tax, but nothing in it answers that."

That is deliberate. A vault that produces a confident-sounding date for a visa it has never seen is worse than one that admits it does not know.

The optional AI layer

Some browsers (recent Chrome and Edge) include a small language model that runs on the device. Where one exists, Keepsake uses it for one narrow job: restating the facts it already found as a smoother sentence. It is given only those facts and is instructed to invent nothing; if it strays, or the browser has no model, the quoted answer is what you see.

So: the AI never finds your answers, and it never speaks for a document you don't have. It is a nicety on top of an answer that already stood on its own.

Tips

• Name the document rather than the answer: "car insurance" finds it, "the car thing" does not. The title carries the most weight, but you can use your own word for it — a bill you call an invoice is still found.
• Questions work in Urdu too (میرا پاسپورٹ کب ختم ہو رہا ہے؟), matching the Urdu interface.
• Answers are only as good as the OCR text behind them — see the OCR benchmark.

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