Assistant

The Assistant lets you ask natural-language questions about your procurement. It works through your documents the way a colleague would — searching for wording, opening the file, reading around the match — and cites the exact source behind every claim. It can also read your completed bid analyses to answer what the analysis concluded.

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 Assistant

Click Assistant in the sidebar workflow of any procurement.

Starting a session

The first time you open it, you'll see a Start chatting button. Starting a session prepares your documents for the Assistant to search, which takes a moment on the first run — after that the session stays warm and answers come back immediately.

Once the session is ready, 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.

When a session ends

A session that sits idle for a while is released to free up resources. When that happens the panel shows Session ended with a Start again button. Your conversation history is preserved — starting again re-prepares the documents and picks up where you left off.

How it works

The Assistant has no search index and no precomputed summary of your documents. It works them directly:

1. It searches for the wording your question implies, varying the pattern when the first attempt comes up empty — important for Latvian and other heavily inflected languages, where a search for a word stem finds what a full form misses
2. It opens the matching files and reads the surrounding lines before answering, so the answer reflects context rather than a single grep hit
3. For questions about what an analysis concluded — a bid's gaps, its compliance against your criteria, which lots a vendor bid on — it reads the analysis results instead of re-reading raw documents
4. The response streams in as it's written

Because it searches on demand rather than consulting an index, it will keep looking when a first search fails, and it will tell you plainly when something genuinely isn't in the documents.

Scans and images

The Assistant can answer from scanned pages and images, but only once an analysis has read them on that procurement. The transcription is produced during an analysis run and reused by the Assistant at no extra cost — so if you ask about a scanned certificate before running any analysis, the Assistant will correctly tell you it cannot read that file yet.

Citations

Every factual claim in the Assistant's response carries a numbered citation like [1] or [2]. The numbers are assigned by the search itself, at the moment a line is retrieved, so a citation always points at the file the claim actually came from.

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

If an answer doesn't include citations, treat it with more caution — the Assistant may be reasoning rather than quoting. Ordinary conversational replies and statements that something is absent are not cited, by design.

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 conversation keeps its context, so you can drill down — "What about their experience in similar projects?" works after asking about a vendor.
• Use it alongside analysis. The Assistant is great for quick questions, while the full analysis gives you a structured compliance report. They complement each other.

Limitations

• The Assistant is read-only. It can explain, summarize, and compare, but it can't change analysis results, re-analyze documents, access other procurements, or make decisions for you.
• Answers about what an analysis found require that the analysis has been run.
• Scanned and image content becomes answerable only after an analysis has transcribed it.
• Each procurement has one conversation per user. All your questions and answers for that procurement live in the same thread.