What Are Notebooks?
A Notebook is a private workspace where you upload PDF documents and chat with an AI that’s grounded in their contents. Instead of pasting text into the main chat, you build a small library and ask questions against it — the assistant retrieves the most relevant passages from your documents to answer.
Notebooks are separate from your main conversations and keep their own chat history.
Creating a Notebook
- Open Notebooks from the sidebar.
- Click + New Notebook.
- Drag and drop (or browse for) PDF files — up to 50 MB each.
- Click Create Notebook. Tesseract then processes each document — parsing, chunking, summarizing, and indexing it — which takes roughly a minute or two. A title and thumbnail are generated automatically while you wait. You can start chatting as soon as processing finishes.
Supported files: PDFs only, up to 50 MB each. You can add more documents to a notebook at any time from the documents panel. Each document shows a processing-status indicator until it’s ready.
Inside a Notebook
A notebook has two panels:
- Left — Conversations: Your chat threads for this notebook. Use New Chat to start another. Click the notebook title to rename it.
- Right — Documents: The PDFs you’ve uploaded, each with a processing-status indicator. Add more with Upload PDF. This panel also holds Prep Packs (quizzes — see the Quizzes & Prep Packs page).
Chatting in a Notebook
Type a question and the assistant answers using passages pulled from your documents. Responses render as the same block documents you get in the main chat — text, tables, math, charts, and so on.
Below each assistant reply you’ll find feedback buttons (👍 / 👎). These tell us whether the right passages were retrieved; a thumbs-down opens a short comment box so you can say what went wrong.
What Notebooks Are Good For
- Studying from lecture notes, textbooks, or papers
- Asking targeted questions across a set of readings
- Generating practice quizzes from your own material (see Quizzes & Prep Packs)