The hardest moment in any chat interface is the first one. A blinking cursor, a document you have not read, and no idea what it is reasonable to ask.
That is what the strip beside a Docutrain conversation is for. On a desktop it sits in a sidebar next to the chat, holding the cover image, the introduction, and a row of labeled chips under Available tools:. On a phone there is no room for a sidebar, so the tools fold into the composer as a Tools chip. Tapping it raises a sheet listing each one with a short description, like "Browse key themes" or "Test your knowledge".
Fourteen tools can appear. Most documents show three or four, because each has to be switched on and have something in it. A gallery with no images stays hidden rather than opening onto nothing. If a document has none, the strip is simply absent.
The ones that solve the blank cursor
Key Topics is the fastest way in. It ranks what the document is actually about, extracted during processing, each topic with a bar showing its relative weight, under the hint "Ranked by importance · click to ask". Every one is clickable, and clicking places the question into the chat box already typed.
For someone who has just opened a two-hundred-page guideline, that is the difference between a blank prompt and a first answer.
Recent Questions works on the other instinct: what did everyone else want to know? It lists what other readers asked, newest first, with a timestamp and sometimes a small country flag, updating live. Click one and it gets asked on your behalf. If a saved answer is still current it replays instantly, but if the document has been retrained since, a fresh answer is generated instead. Nobody is served a stale answer to save a second.
It is also carefully filtered. Duplicates collapse, questions the assistant could not answer are left out, and the tool stays hidden until at least two suitable questions exist, so a new document never advertises a thin list. Administrators get a plus button on each entry, opening Pin Question and Delete Question. Deleting removes it from the public list without touching the conversation behind it.
Pinned Questions is the curated counterpart: the questions an admin decided everyone should see, in a stable list that does not shuffle as traffic arrives.
Your own history, private by construction
Signed-in readers get their conversations back. My Chats on a document's strip covers that document. The same item in the account menu covers every document you have used.
Both are private. Not "private unless the owner looks", but genuinely unavailable to the owner there, and they never feed the public Recent Questions list.
Conversations are grouped into sessions, newest first, labeled with your opening question and a count like 3 exchange(s), above a search box and All / Today / 7 days / 30 days filters. Open one and Continue this conversation loads it back into the chat, switching documents first if you arrived from the global list. One honest detail: a resumed conversation keeps the questions it already spent against its limit, so one that hit the cap will ask you to start fresh instead of pretending otherwise. Deletion, of one conversation or all of them, is immediate and irreversible.
The owner's own material
Files lists the attachments the owner uploaded, with each file's type and size. PDFs open in a viewer that slides over the chat rather than punting you to a download folder. Other formats download directly.
Image Gallery opens a full-screen lightbox with zoom and thumbnails, and Video opens a full-screen player with a playlist. Both are covered in images and video.
Abstract is an AI-written overview of the whole document, stamped with the date it was produced, with Copy and Export as PDF in the footer. A notice marks it stale if the document has been retrained since, which is the sort of thing most products would quietly not mention.
References is worth distinguishing from the numbered citations under answers. Those are automatic and point at passages. This is a bibliography the owner wrote by hand, shown as written, with addresses and DOIs turned into links. Where an owner recorded a PubMed ID, a button fetches the article's details live and offers a link through to PubMed.
Admins can rename the Files, gallery and References chips, so one document offers "Handouts" where another offers Files.
Quiz, form, and one iPhone nicety
Quiz generates a multiple-choice quiz from the document's own content. See quizzes.
Form is the guided-input tool, and it changes answers rather than decorating the page. What you enter is summarized near the chat box and travels as context with every question you ask, so the assistant tailors its answers to your situation instead of the general case. On some documents it arrives as a Before you chat wizard the first time you tap the input. See helpers and guided context.
Add to Home Screen appears only in Safari on an iPhone or iPad, walks through Apple's own three steps, shows the name the shortcut will carry, and warns you when that name is too long to fit under an icon. It disappears once installed.
The notice before you start
The first time you open some documents in a session, a short notice headed About this assistant explains that answers come only from the trained material, and that it will say so when it does not know rather than guess. Got it continues. It shows once per document per browser session, and never inside an embedded chat, where a modal over someone else's website would be rude.
If a tool you were expecting is missing, the answer is almost always that the owner has not switched it on. The document settings tour shows the same switches from the other side of the glass.