Ask Brain

Ask Brain lets you ask questions about your notes in plain language and get answers synthesized from your own knowledge base. Instead of searching, scrolling, and piecing things together yourself, Ask Brain does the work for you — finding the relevant notes, extracting the key information, and presenting a clear answer with source citations.

How it works

When you ask a question, Ariv follows these steps:

1. Search — Ariv searches your vault for notes most relevant to your question using full-text search and semantic matching.
2. Context assembly — The most relevant notes are gathered as context. The ai.maxContextNotes setting controls how many notes are included (default: 10, maximum: 50).
3. AI synthesis — The question and context are sent to your configured AI provider, which generates an answer based solely on your notes.
4. Citation — The answer includes source references so you can verify the information and read the full original notes.

Note

The AI only answers based on what’s in your notes. It will not fabricate information or pull from external knowledge. If the answer isn’t in your vault, Ask Brain will tell you.

Setup

Ask Brain requires an API key from a supported AI provider. Configure this in Settings > AI.

Supported providers

Provider	Type	Notes
Google Gemini	Cloud	Default provider, fast and capable
OpenAI	Cloud	GPT models
Anthropic	Cloud	Claude models
Ollama	Local	Runs entirely on your machine, no API key needed

To set up a provider:

1. Open Settings > AI.
2. Select your preferred provider.
3. Enter your API key (not needed for Ollama).
4. Save.

Tip

If privacy is your top priority, use Ollama. It runs the AI model locally on your machine, so your notes never leave your computer. For the best answer quality, cloud providers like Gemini or Anthropic tend to produce more polished results.

Asking questions

Once configured, open Ask Brain and type your question in natural language. Here are some examples of effective questions:

• “What were the key decisions from last week’s meeting?”
• “Summarize my notes on project X”
• “What action items do I have across all my projects?”
• “What have I written about machine learning?”
• “What are the pros and cons I noted about switching to Postgres?”
• “When did I last meet with the design team, and what did we discuss?”

Reading results

Each Ask Brain response includes:

• The answer — A synthesized response drawn from your notes.
• Source citations — Links to the specific notes that informed the answer. Click any source to open the original note.

Always check the sources if the answer is important to a decision. The AI summarizes well, but the full context in the original note may contain nuances that the summary doesn’t capture.

Context settings

The ai.maxContextNotes setting controls how many notes are sent to the AI as context for each question. The default is 10.

• Increase it (up to 50) if your questions span many notes or topics and you want more comprehensive answers.
• Decrease it if you want faster responses or more focused answers.

Caution

More context notes means better coverage but slower responses and higher API usage. For most questions, the default of 10 works well.

Tips for getting better answers

• Write descriptive note titles. Ask Brain uses titles to find relevant notes. A title like “Q1 Marketing Strategy” is far more discoverable than “Untitled 4.”
• Use headings and structure. Well-organized notes help the AI extract the right sections.
• Be specific in your questions. “What did I decide about the pricing model for Project Atlas?” will get a better answer than “Tell me about Project Atlas.”
• Build up your vault. Ask Brain works best when your vault has rich, interconnected notes. The more you capture, the more useful it becomes.

Usage limits

Tier	Monthly queries
Free	20
Pro	Unlimited

During the beta period, all features including Ask Brain are free with no limits.

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Related: Dashboard — See action items and vault stats at a glance | Quick Capture — The more you capture, the smarter Ask Brain gets