--- title: Ask description: Ask questions about your own rules and documents, and know what the answer is allowed to be based on. --- Using Vythos # Ask Ask is the quickest way to find out what your agency's position is. Type the question you'd ask a colleague: - *What are our payment terms?* - *What's our minimum project fee?* - *What's Acme's notice period?* - *Summarise our brand voice* - *What did we quote them last time?* ## What an answer is built from 1. **Your rules** — the ones you're allowed to see, with the relevant client's rules ranked above your house defaults. 2. **Your own memory** — passages from the documents you've connected or uploaded. 3. **Who your agency is** — the description in Settings, and the list of clients you've added. It's context, never quoted as a rule. 4. **The conversation so far** — so a follow-up is understood. It's used to work out what you mean, not as a source: every fact still comes from 1 and 2. The answer names what it used, listed under it. Each question uses one **credit** from the month's allowance. Greetings don't, and neither does an answer that failed on our side. See [Plans and credits](/using-vythos/plans-and-credits). ## Conversations Every question and answer is kept, so leaving the page or reloading it loses nothing. Your conversations are listed beside Ask, most recent first, and the last one reopens when you come back. - **Follow-ups work.** Ask *"What's our senior designer day rate?"*, then *"and for a half day?"* — the second question is read in light of the first. So are *"make that shorter"* and *"put it in a table"*. - **New chat** starts a fresh conversation; nothing from the old one carries into it. - **Delete** a conversation from the list, with a confirmation. - **Your conversations are yours.** Nobody else in the workspace can read them — not the owner, not a lead. The same goes for your memory. ## Reading and reusing an answer Answers are formatted — lists, bold figures, tables when you ask for one — and appear as they're written. Before the first words, the answer shows what it's doing: *Searching your documents…*, then *Thinking…*. **Copy**, under each answer, puts it on your clipboard twice over: formatted, for an email or a document, and as plain text, for Slack or a form. Paste it wherever it's going and the right one is used. If you reload or close the page while an answer is being written, it's still finished and kept — it'll be in the conversation when you come back. ## The rules it follows Ask is deliberately constrained, because a confident wrong answer about your own terms is worse than no answer: - **Only your material.** Nothing from the wider world, no general knowledge about how agencies usually work. - **The rule beats the document.** Where a rule and an older note disagree, the answer comes from the rule — and says the note disagrees, so you can go and fix the note. - **Figures are quoted, never calculated.** If your rate card says "£900 a day" and "overage at 1.5× the standard day rate", Ask gives you both, and says the arithmetic is yours. It won't hand you an hourly figure that appears in no version of your Playbook. - **Gaps are said, not filled.** If no document says how something is invoiced or who signs it off, the answer says the Playbook doesn't cover that part, rather than inventing something plausible. - **Weak matches are hedged.** When the search finds only loosely related material, the answer says so instead of asserting. ## Clients Name the client in the question — "What are Acme's payment terms?" — and their rules are used ahead of your defaults. Vythos matches the name against the clients you've added; it never invents one, and if two client names are too similar to tell apart it uses neither rather than guessing. A follow-up keeps the client — *"and their logo?"* after a question about Acme is about Acme. Ask also knows the list itself, so *"how many clients do we have?"* is answered from the clients you've added — the same count as the Clients list, and only those: a name that appears in a document isn't counted, because documents mention prospects and past clients too. Someone restricted to particular clients is told about theirs, and not given the agency's total. ## What Ask is not - **Not a chat about your industry.** It answers from your material. - **Not a writing tool.** For drafting with your rules applied, connect your writing tool — see [AI tools](/ai-tools/overview). - **Not a way around permissions.** A teammate's Ask only sees what their access allows. A category they don't have never reaches them. ## For teammates Everyone in the workspace gets Ask, filtered to their own access and their own memory. It's the fastest way for a freelancer to check your tone-of-voice rules without being given your rate card. ::: info When something is withheld When a category is withheld from someone, their answer doesn't include it, and doesn't say that it exists. If a teammate tells you Ask can't find something you know is in the Playbook, check their access on the Members page. ::: ## When an answer looks wrong 1. **Open the rule it cited** on the Playbook and read the document text. Nine times in ten the document really does say that, and the surprise is useful. 2. **Check the version.** If the document was edited in the last few minutes, the rule may not have caught up — it follows within about ten minutes. 3. **Look for a second rule saying something different.** Two rules stating the same value at the same scope is a disagreement in your Playbook, and Vythos won't resolve it for you. Retire one. 4. **Check the document date.** A rule quoting 2023 terms is a document that needs an edit, not a bug.