Document chat

The Document Assistant lets you ask natural-language questions about your procurement documents. It searches across all RFP and proposal documents in the procurement, finds relevant passages, and answers with inline source citations so you can verify every claim.

When to use it

• Quick lookups — "What is the submission deadline?" instead of scanning a 200-page RFP
• Cross-document questions — "Does Vendor A's proposed timeline match the RFP requirement?" pulls from both RFP and proposal
• Clarification — "What exactly does Section 4.2 require for financial guarantees?" when the language is dense
• Pre-analysis questions — get a quick sense of what's in the documents before running a full analysis

Opening the chat

Click Chat in the sidebar workflow of any procurement. The chat opens in a full-screen panel with your conversation history preserved — you can leave and come back without losing context.

If this is your first time, you'll see suggested questions to get started:

• "What are the key deadlines?"
• "What are the main evaluation criteria?"
• "Summarize the technical requirements"

Click any suggestion or type your own question.

How it works

When you send a message:

1. The assistant searches all indexed documents in the procurement (both RFP and proposal documents) using semantic search
2. It finds the most relevant passages across all documents
3. It generates an answer using the retrieved content, citing sources inline
4. The response streams in real-time as it's being generated

Citations

Every factual claim in the assistant's response includes a numbered citation like [1], [2], etc. These appear as small badges in the text.

At the bottom of each response, a Sources section lists all cited documents with links. Click a document name to open it in the document viewer.

Citations help you:

• Verify answers — check that the assistant interpreted the document correctly
• Find the source — jump directly to the relevant document when you need more context
• Build trust — every answer is grounded in your actual documents, not general knowledge

Tips

• Be specific. "What is the required warranty period for Lot 2?" works better than "Tell me about warranties."
• Reference documents by name. "What does Vendor A propose for staffing?" helps the assistant focus its search.
• Ask follow-up questions. The chat maintains conversation context, so you can drill down — "What about their experience in similar projects?" works after asking about a vendor.
• Use it alongside analysis. The chat is great for quick questions, while the full analysis gives you a structured compliance report. They complement each other.

Limitations

• The chat searches document content that has been parsed and indexed. Scanned PDFs with poor OCR quality may yield incomplete results.
• The assistant answers based on what's in your documents. It won't fabricate information, but it may miss content that wasn't well-parsed.
• Each procurement has one chat thread per user. All your questions and answers for that procurement live in the same conversation.