Research Companion

The Research Companion is an AI chat assistant that can read your knowledge base and answer questions about your family history in plain language. You can find it at /research-companion. It writes its answers as it goes, streaming the text in real time, and can show its reasoning while it works.

This guide covers how to start a conversation, ask good questions, attach records and profiles for context, let the Companion make changes for you, and stay within your usage budget.

Start a conversation

The Companion keeps a list of your past chats in the left panel, so you can pick up where you left off.

1. Click "New conversation" to open a blank chat.
2. Or click any past conversation in the left panel to reopen it.

Your conversations are saved automatically. When you come back to the Companion, your most recent conversation reopens on its own, so you do not have to find it again.

Ask questions

Ask in natural language, the way you would ask another researcher. The Companion searches your people, records, families, and timeline to answer.

Some examples to try:

• "What records do I have for John Smith?"
• "Who are Sarah's siblings?"
• "What is missing for my great-grandfather?"

You do not need to phrase things precisely or use special syntax. Describe what you want to know, and the Companion pulls the relevant information from your knowledge base to build its answer.

Citations you can click

When the Companion names a person or a record in its answer, that name appears as a chip. Click the chip to jump straight to that profile or record. These links are checked for accuracy, so a chip points to the exact item the Companion referenced.

This makes it easy to verify an answer or to keep working. Ask a question, then click through to the profile or record the Companion mentioned to see the underlying detail for yourself.

Attach records and profiles for context

You can attach up to 5 items to each message so the AI focuses on them; attached items stay with the conversation as it goes. The items you can attach are records, profiles, duplicate matches, conflicts, and research findings.

There are two ways to attach something:

1. Use the + button in the message box to add an item to the conversation you are in.
2. Use the "Ask Kleio" button on a record, profile, or match elsewhere in the app. This opens a fresh conversation with that item already attached.

The right-hand panel lists everything that is currently attached, so you can always see what the AI is working with.

Tip: attach a record or profile first, then ask about it. The Companion answers best when it has context, so giving it the specific item up front leads to sharper, more grounded answers than asking about a name in the abstract.

Let the Companion make changes (it always asks first)

The Companion can offer to make edits for you. It can:

• Create a profile
• Update facts on a profile
• Link a record to a person
• Add a family relationship
• Merge duplicate profiles
• Resolve or dismiss a research suggestion

It never makes a change on its own. When it wants to edit something, it pauses and shows a confirmation card that describes exactly what it plans to do. Nothing happens until you act on that card:

1. Read the change described on the confirmation card.
2. Click Confirm to apply it, or Reject to cancel it.

If you find yourself confirming the same kind of action repeatedly, you can choose "Always allow this session" on the card. That stops the Companion from asking again for that kind of action for as long as you keep the app open in that browser tab - it carries across conversations, and resets when you reload the page or open a new tab.

Bigger changes, such as merging two profiles, are clearly flagged so you always know when something significant is about to happen. If you ask for a merge without saying what to keep, and the two profiles disagree on a detail such as a birth year, the Companion asks you which value to use before it does anything. Its confirmation card then lists each detail the merged profile will keep, so you can see the outcome before approving it. A merge can be reversed afterward with "Undo merge" on the profile you kept. For more on cleaning up duplicates, see Finding duplicates.

Attaching your own files

Sometimes you have a document you want to ask about but do not want in your knowledge base: a screenshot of an archive index, a page from a finding aid, a photo of a gravestone you have not decided about yet.

Use the paperclip button next to the message box to attach it. You can also paste a screenshot straight into the message box, or drag files onto the conversation.

This does not use an upload credit. Attached files are answered inside the conversation and count against your Research Companion usage instead. If you decide the document belongs in your tree, upload it properly from the Upload page so it gets transcribed, extracted, and linked to people.

You can attach JPG, PNG, WebP and PDF files, up to 10 MB each and 5 per message. PDFs can be up to 20 pages. If your photo is a HEIC file (the iPhone default), convert it to JPG first.

Attached files stay with the conversation and show up in the Files panel on the right, alongside anything you attached from your knowledge base. Deleting the conversation deletes the files with it.

Search the public web

Beyond your own records, the Companion can search the public web and read pages to bring in outside context, such as historical background or information about an archive.

Web results appear as plain links. They are kept visually separate from the citation chips that link into your own knowledge base, so you can always tell whether a source is something from your records or something from the open web.

Ask how KleioBase works

You can also ask the Companion how to use KleioBase itself, not just about your family history. It can answer questions about uploading and processing records, your knowledge base, finding and merging duplicates, importing and exporting your data, and your plan, billing, and credits.

Some examples to try:

• "How do I export my data?"
• "What is included in the Archivist plan?"
• "How does finding duplicates work?"

The Companion answers these from the same help center you are reading now, so the guidance stays in step with how the product actually works.

Work on research suggestions

KleioBase generates research suggestions for you, pointing out gaps and records that may be missing. The Companion can help you act on them.

1. Ask the Companion about your research suggestions to talk through what is open.
2. Attach a suggestion to the conversation to focus on it and work it through.

Because a research suggestion is one of the item types you can attach, you can pin one and then ask the Companion how to close the gap it describes.

Stop a response

Navigating away does not stop a response. If you leave the page while the Companion is replying, the answer keeps writing in the background and is waiting for you when you return. This means you will not lose a long answer just because you switched to another part of the app.

To actually stop a reply while it is being written, click the Stop button. Use this when an answer is heading in the wrong direction or you have already seen what you needed.

Usage limits

Each plan includes a usage budget for the Companion over a rolling 3-hour window: up to 80k tokens per 3 hours on the free Explorer plan, and more on every paid plan (see Plans & Billing). A banner shows how much of that budget you have used so far, and roughly how many more messages you have.

When the budget is spent, you have two options:

1. Wait for the time window to reset, which restores your budget.
2. Upgrade your plan for a larger budget.

Higher plans also use a stronger AI model, which can improve the quality of answers. For the details of what each plan includes, see Plans & Billing.

Where to go next

• Your Knowledge Base is the data the Companion reads when it answers your questions.
• Family Tree lets you click Ask Kleio on any person to start a conversation about them.
• Finding duplicates covers how the Companion can help you spot and merge duplicate profiles.
• Uploading records explains how records get into your knowledge base in the first place.