Feature Update: January 2025 AI Chat Enhancements

We’re thrilled to announce significant upgrades to AI Chat, making it more powerful, versatile, and tailored to your needs. These new features enhance how you interact with your private data, empowering you to complete tasks with precision and efficiency.

Select Foundational Models On-The-Fly

AI Chat now allows you to dynamically choose the foundational model during a conversation:

• GPT-4o-mini: Ideal for cost-effective tasks like analysis and summarization, offering robust performance at a lower cost.
• GPT-4o: Suited for complex problem-solving, in-depth insights, and nuanced document generation.

Switch between models at any point in a chat, ensuring the right balance of cost and capability for every situation.

Chat Suggestions

AI Chat can now suggest follow-up prompts to enrich your conversation. These context-aware suggestions guide you toward additional insights, helping you explore your data more thoroughly and effectively.

Private Data Scope Visibility

Gain deeper visibility into how AI Chat interacts with your data:

• Scope Indicators: AI Chat clearly displays whether it is working within a single site or across all sites.
• Document Count: Each response now includes the number of documents reviewed during its preparation, providing transparency into the AI’s process.

As always, private data sources are cited with links to the originating documents within Clear Ideas, ensuring accountability and ease of reference.

Output Templates for Structured Responses

Take control of AI Chat’s output with the new Output Templates feature:

• Flexibility: Use any document as a template to guide the formatting, tone, and structure of your responses. Markdown-formatted files provide the most consistent results, but all text-based templates are supported.
• Dynamic Adaptation: AI Chat intelligently integrates your private data, asking for additional details when needed to align the output with your chosen template.
• Example Use Cases:
  • Generate a tailored letter using an existing template by specifying the recipient and purpose.
  • Prepare professional reports, summaries, or contracts styled and formatted to your specifications.

Combine Output Templates with Private Data Scope for seamless AI-powered document generation.

Attach Files for Focused AI Chats

Focus your AI-powered conversations by attaching up to five files from any Clear Ideas site you have access to.

• Key Benefits:
  • Summarization: Quickly distill key points from attached documents.
  • Comparison: Generate insightful comparisons between multiple files.
  • Targeted Document Generation: Attach a relevant template and create precise, AI-generated documents tailored to your needs.

Attached files lock the chat’s focus, enabling unparalleled specificity while retaining access to broader private data within your selected scope. Start a new chat to attach different files.

Unique Use Cases for Attaching Files

1. Summarization: Attach board meeting minutes, and AI Chat will provide a concise summary.
2. Comparison: Attach multiple versions of a contract for AI-powered comparisons that highlight key differences.
3. Document Creation: Attach a markdown-formatted proposal template and draft a tailored pitch by providing AI Chat with your private data and objectives.

When combining file attachments with Output Templates, you unlock AI Document Generation capabilities, making it easier than ever to create polished, professional documents.

Additional Improvements and Bug Fixes

• General UI enhancements for improved accessibility and usability.
• Refinements to AI credit handling for seamless cost tracking.

Feature Update: AI-Powered Semantic Search Replaces Full-Text Search

In this release, we’re excited to announce a major upgrade to our search capabilities. Full-text search has been officially sunset, replaced by AI-powered semantic search, leveraging embeddings and vector search technology. This upgrade reflects our commitment to providing more relevant, insightful search results and strengthening data security for our users.

Benefits of AI-Powered Semantic Search

AI-powered semantic search brings a significant improvement in how users can find and understand content:

1. More Meaningful Results: Unlike traditional keyword-based search, semantic search understands the context and meaning behind queries. This enables you to find relevant information even if the exact keywords are not present in the content.

   • Example: Searching for “latest financial insights” with traditional full-text search might only return documents containing that exact phrase. With semantic search, results will include documents containing terms like “recent market analysis” or “current economic overview,” providing a richer and more contextually relevant set of results.

2. Enhanced Relevance and Context: By using AI embeddings, which capture the nuanced meanings of words and phrases, semantic search offers results that align with the user’s intent, reducing the need for multiple searches and refining workflows.

Security Advantages with AI-Powered Search

One of the primary reasons for this transition is to enhance data privacy and security. Our AI-powered search leverages advanced encryption measures to ensure that sensitive data remains protected at every step:

• Data Remains Encrypted: Unlike full-text search, which required partial data decryption for indexing, vector-based semantic search keeps your data encrypted throughout the entire process. The system only uses unencrypted data temporarily during the embedding process, ensuring that plaintext data is never stored, searched, or indexed.
• Reduced Exposure Risk: With AI embeddings created from securely encrypted content, data is accessible only to authorized users without risk of exposure through plaintext search indexes, aligning with Clear Ideas’ commitment to protecting your sensitive information.

This upgrade aligns with our security-first approach, maintaining strict data-at-rest encryption and SSL-based end-to-end encryption while also offering more advanced, AI-driven search capabilities.

Additional Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Enhanced AI Credit handing for free users
• General UI tweaks and bug fixes

AI Improvements

The AI Chat feature has seen further enhancements, including:

• More Reliable Source References
  We've improved AI Chat's ability to provide source references from your private data in a more consistent, reliable, and organized way.

• Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Capabilities
  AI Chat now breaks down user requests into topic components for more accurate retrieval from your private data. Requests that span multiple topic areas should see improved results and increased relevance. We've also enhanced AI's ability to request additional private data as the chat session evolves.

• Updated to the Latest LLMs
  AI Chat has been updated to leverage the latest foundational models from OpenAI.

AI-Enhanced Search

In addition to Clear Ideas' utilizes AI-powered semantic search to provide comprehensive and more meaningful results. Our AI search can help you discover additional relevant content.

For example, a full-text search for "Furry Dog" might not return results where the document says "Fuzzy Puppy." With AI search, related terms like "Furry Dog" and "Fuzzy Puppy" are recognized as similar, increasing the likelihood that both appear in the same results. AI-enhanced search is especially useful when few results are returned, as it typically generates more comprehensive results.

Additional Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Added the ability to automatically expire a site share after a specified number of days.
• Added an expiry indicator showing the expiration date for site users.
• Enhanced user group filtering to allow group-to-group comparisons in Analytics.
• Improved two-factor authentication with enhanced support for authenticator apps.
• Users can now adjust the width of the search results and AI Chat by dragging a handle, improving customization for a more personalized layout experience.

Site Templates

Sites can now be created using more than 100 templates. These templates have been specially design for various industry-specific use cases. They help you organize your information quickly and ensure that the information is comprehensive and aligns with best practices in various industry. The focus of the templates is on projects where external collaboration and a single source of truth is paramount.

To create a site with a template, select 'Templates' on the main menu. You can browse and preview templates. You can then select 'Create Site With Template' to create an empty site with the template. Of course you can still create your own empty site, or upload a zip file with your content organized.