Research across your files without starting from zero
ChatOTL is a private AI research assistant for material you already hold. Upload papers, PDFs, reports and notes into reusable knowledge bases, and DeepSeek answers from retrieved passages of those documents — so every answer traces back to a source you can open, and follow-up questions keep the same source set in scope.
A research assistant is only useful if you can check it. ChatOTL never browses the web, so it has nothing to answer from except the documents you supplied — which is exactly why its answers are verifiable.
The other half is persistence. A source set you upload once becomes a knowledge base you can query weeks later, instead of a chat you have to rebuild from scratch.
What you can put in
- Research papers and preprints as PDFs.
- Internal reports, memos and specifications.
- Interview transcripts and meeting notes.
- CSV and JSON datasets for a first structural look.
- Scanned pages, transcribed by a vision pipeline before DeepSeek reads them.
Reusable knowledge bases
Upload a document set once. It is chunked and embedded, and relevant passages are retrieved into any later conversation you attach that knowledge base to. Document titles and, where the source provides them, page or section references come back with the passage so you know where to look.
Grounded answers and follow-ups
Ask for a claim, a method, a stated limitation or a number, and the answer is drafted from retrieved text rather than recollection. Follow-up questions stay in the same thread with the same sources in scope, so you can drill in without re-establishing context.
Compare across sources
With more than one document in scope, ask where two sources disagree, which one reports a larger effect, or which assumption they do not share. Branch the thread per hypothesis to develop competing readings side by side.
Private and self-contained
Row-level security scopes every conversation, message, upload and knowledge base to your account. Chat generation is DeepSeek; Gemini handles embeddings and transcription only.
Limitations
- No web access: it cannot find literature for you or check what has been published since.
- It can misread a table or a figure — verify quantitative claims against the source.
- A summary compresses, it does not validate. Peer review is still peer review.
Frequently asked questions
Can ChatOTL answer from my own PDFs?
Yes. Attach PDFs to a message or add them to a knowledge base, and answers are drafted from passages retrieved out of those documents. Scanned pages are transcribed by a vision pipeline first — DeepSeek does not see the image itself.
What is a knowledge base used for here?
A reusable source set. Upload the documents once; they are chunked and embedded, and any later conversation can retrieve from them. It is the difference between one useful chat and a research corpus you keep coming back to.
Do answers say where they came from?
Retrieved passages carry their document title, and page or section references where the source exposes them. Asking for the supporting sentence is the fastest way to get a pointer you can check.
Can I ask follow-up questions across several documents at once?
Yes. Keep the sources in scope in one thread and ask comparative questions — where they diverge, what each measures, which is more cautious.
Is unpublished research safe here?
Conversations, uploads and knowledge bases are scoped to your account by row-level security. For stricter control, bring your own DeepSeek key or register your own compatible endpoint.
Try ChatOTL for research
Create a free account, upload your first source set and ask it something you can check.
Try ChatOTL for research