Chat with your documents and PDFs in Workbench

Ask about one file

Press Attach beside the message box, or drop or paste a file: a PDF, Word (.docx), Markdown, text, CSV, HTML or code file. Any model answers from it. Sources under the answer lists the Files sent to the model, with their pages and size in tokens.

A long file asks you to Choose how much to read: Read it all, Read the first part, or Search it instead. Each button says how many tokens it sends. A file is read whole without asking up to 6,000 tokens, or a quarter of the model’s window if that is less.

Keep documents to search

1. Open Documents. Under Add files, press Choose files, or drop files there.
2. In a chat, press the Documents chip at the top and switch on Documents in this chat. New chats start with it off. To change that, switch on Documents in new chats under Settings on Documents.
3. Ask. Sources lists each passage sent, by file, pages and heading, and marks the ones the answer used as Cited.

To keep answers to what your documents say, switch on Documents only in the same place. If nothing matches, Workbench says so itself and offers Ask the model anyway.

Each document has Open original, Show indexed text, Re-read and Remove. Adding a file with the same name replaces the older one.

Search by meaning

Without a search model, Workbench finds passages by their words, spelled the same: “costs” does not find “cost”. With one running, it searches by meaning and by words. To run one, see Run a local embedding model and reranker. Workbench uses the first local search model it finds. If the search model changes, Documents offers Rebuild search.

A result sorter puts the best passages first. Its Sort time is 3 s by default, which suits a GPU, where a question takes about 0.6 s. On a typical CPU a question takes about 7 s, so Workbench skips the sort and says why. To sort there anyway, raise Sort time in Workbench’s settings in Eugene’s console.

To see what a question finds, use Test a question on Documents.

Add a folder

The owner first grants you the folder: see Add MCP tools and folders to Workbench. Then:

1. Open Documents and go to Folders, then Add a folder.
2. Pick the Folder to add. To skip some files, open Choose what to leave out first.
3. Press Add folder.

Workbench reads the folder’s files as your documents and never changes anything in it. It checks the folder every 10 minutes by default, and when you press Sync now.

Good to know

• A file can be up to 50 MiB, and Workbench keeps up to 100,000 passages for you.
• It skips scanned PDFs (it cannot read text in pictures), PowerPoint, Excel, EPUB and RTF files, and files a cloud-sync program keeps online only.
• A folder can hold up to 10,000 files and 2,048 MB. Only folders on the machine Workbench runs on can be added, not Job Site folders yet.
• By default, passages are not sent to models outside your machines: the chat offers Send for this chat. Files you attach are always sent.
• Folders need a Windows service install or a Linux system install, and on Linux, Landlock ABI 3 or later. They do not work on macOS.