Summary
PrivateGPT is a KnowledgeFlow assistant for everyday work tasks — drafting, summarising, explaining, analysing and translating. Unlike other KnowledgeFlow assistants, it does not draw on your organisation’s indexed library. It answers from general knowledge, from whatever you upload or bring into the conversation, and from anything your administrators have added under Organisation Context. There is nothing to set up. Ask it something and you have an answer straight away. Bring in a document or a web page and it grounds its answer in that instead. Allow a couple of minutes for your first try.
Before you start
- If your question is about a document, bring the document. Upload it or paste the text in — both work. PDF, TXT, CSV, MD, DOCX, DOC, XLS and XLSX are all supported, and XLS/XLSX are read sheet by sheet rather than just the first tab. Scanned pages and handwriting are readable too. Limit is 100MB per document.
- If it’s on the open web, bring the page in with Ingest from URL, under Sources in the top menu. PrivateGPT has no browsing of its own — this is the only way anything from the web reaches the conversation.
How it works
It won’t guess about anything internal. Ask about a policy, a system or a record it has no way of seeing, and it says so plainly and points you elsewhere, rather than producing a plausible-sounding answer. This is deliberate: PrivateGPT is the one assistant on your account built without an indexed library behind it, so an invented internal answer is worse than an honest “I don’t know.” It won’t pretend to be current. For anything that depends on recent events or live information, it tells you to verify rather than answering as if its knowledge were up to date. It has no browsing of its own — if you need it to work from something current, bring the page in yourself with Ingest from URL. It tells you what it’s sure of. Answers are explicit about the difference between a stated fact, an inference, and something it genuinely doesn’t know. It can read as more hedged than a search engine; that’s the point — a confident wrong answer is harder to catch than an honest gap.
Try it now
The quickest way to see what PrivateGPT does is to ask it something.
- Open PrivateGPT.
- Ask it something you’d normally ask a colleague or look up yourself — draft an email, explain a term, summarise a paragraph you paste in.
- Read the answer.
You will know it worked when you have something usable back, with nothing uploaded and nothing set up first.
The one button
PrivateGPT has a single button. Everything else happens through open conversation. Summarise documents
- Use it when: you have one or more documents and want a scannable summary of each.
- You get: one summary per document, under its filename as a heading — what it is, its purpose or main argument, the key points, and any decisions, actions or recommendations it contains.
- Note: if nothing is uploaded yet, it asks you to share the documents first rather than guessing what you mean.
Getting better results
- Bring a document or a page in whenever the answer needs to be accurate to your organisation. General knowledge is the fallback, not a substitute for your own material.
- Ask your administrator about Organisation Context if internal answers feel thin. Not every organisation has this switched on yet — if internal answers come up short, that may be why, rather than a fault in the assistant.
- Check the source references when you’ve shared a document or a page. They show exactly which source a claim came from.
- Verify anything current before you rely on it. PrivateGPT will tell you when this applies.
- Tell us when it should have known something and didn’t. If an internal answer comes up short, say what it should have found. That’s the fastest way to work out whether Organisation Context needs filling in.
What it will not do
- Answer questions about internal data, systems, policies or records unless your organisation has added them under Organisation Context.
- Reach the internet on its own. The only web content it can use is what you bring in yourself with Ingest from URL.
- Fabricate facts, statistics, citations, quotes or sources.
- Treat a current-events or live-data answer as reliable without telling you to check it.
Common questions
Why won’t it answer a question about our internal policy? Because it has no indexed library and no visibility of anything internal unless your administrators have added it under Organisation Context. Ask them to add it if this comes up often. Can it browse the internet? No. Bring a page in with Ingest from URL, under Sources in the top menu, and it will work from that. Why does it keep saying it isn’t sure? It separates what it knows, what it’s inferring and what it genuinely doesn’t know, rather than answering everything with the same confidence. Treat the hedge as useful information, not noise. Is there a limit on how big a file I can upload? Yes — 100MB per document.
Next steps
Try it on something real from your own work this week, and ask your administrator whether Organisation Context is set up — most of the “it didn’t know that” moments come down to that being empty.