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FOBIE.ai

Answer questions from my own files and documents

The answer is in a contract, a manual or three years of emails, and finding it takes twenty minutes. This job is about asking a question and getting the answer with the page it came from.

What a good result looks like

Use this to judge a demo. A tool that cannot do these is not doing the job, whatever it is called.

  • It quotes the source, so you can check it.
  • It says the documents do not cover it rather than inventing an answer.
  • It handles scans and photographs, not just clean text.
  • Your documents are not mixed in with anyone else's, and are not used to train anything.

What usually goes wrong

The things people find out after they have paid.

  • Made-up answers are the failure mode here, and they are fluent and plausible. Never act on one without opening the source.
  • Uploading your whole document archive to a third party is a decision, not a setup step.
  • Check the limits: many tools cap the number or size of documents well below a real business archive.

3 tools that do this

How this list is ordered — and why money is not one of the reasons
  1. 1. How squarely the tool does this job. A tool built for this job comes before one that can be made to do it. A tool that needs wiring up comes last.
  2. 2. How much we actually know about it. A tool we have used ourselves comes before one we have only researched, which comes before one only a reader has written in about, which comes before one nobody has assessed. A tool low on this list is not bad. It is unknown.
  3. 3. How technical you need to be. Where the first two signals tie, the one a non-technical person can set up alone comes first. This site is for people who are not going to write code.
  4. 4. How recently we checked the listing. A listing we checked last month is worth more to you than one we checked last year, so it breaks the remaining ties. Listings we have never checked come last.

Nothing commercial appears on that list, and nothing commercial is given to the code that orders it. How we make money, and how you can check.

  1. NotebookLM

    by Google

    This is the job it exists for, and it cites the passage every time.

    Built for thisListed, not reviewedNo setup help neededFree tier to try it

  2. Claude

    by Anthropic

    Upload a set of documents and ask across them; it quotes back what it used.

    Does this wellListed, not reviewedNo setup help neededFree tier to try it

  3. ChatGPT

    by OpenAI

    You can upload files, but building something colleagues can query takes setting up.

    Can, once set upListed, not reviewedNo setup help neededFree tier to try it

Reviews against this job

Listed, not reviewedIt is in the directory. Nobody here has assessed it yet.

Nobody here has assessed any of these tools against this job yet. The listings above describe what each one is sold to do and how squarely it fits — which is real information — but none of it is a verdict, and this page does not pretend otherwise.

Used one of these for this job? Tell us what happened — reader reports are published as reader reports, in your words, clearly labelled.

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