Using DevonThink’s New AI Integration

DEVONthink Artificial Intelligence
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I haven’t mentioned it yet, but I want to extend a big thank you to the DT team for the AI integration. It’s been one of the features I’ve most hoped for.

I’m still figuring out how to best incorporate it into my workflows, but overall, I really like the added capability. The more I use it, the more I find it to be beneficial; however, I’ve also encountered some aspects that are a bit frustrating or inconvenient.

The big one is, chats are not persistent. After restarting DT4, chat conversations disappear (although the chat popover now appears to be persistent — I’m not sure if that’s a new feature or if I just overlooked it). This prevents me from returning to a chat and continuing the AI conversation, or simply revisiting the information from the chat, on that specific topic. I understand that I can save the chats, but this feels counterintuitive to using the AI chat feature.

Chatting about documents in the sidebar is quite good, but a persistent chat sidebar for each document (or group) would be highly useful, at least for how I use AI.

Additionally, the chat prompt box has limited expansion and doesn’t allow adding blank lines with shift-return. Since a long prompt or including text at the end often requires more space, having the ability to shift-return seems necessary.

I realize that’s probably asking a lot, but since I’m asking, I would also like the ability to set different default instructions for each group. AI would be used differently for a set of insurance documents than for a set of business purchase documents or fiction writing. Being able to assign different roles to each group would be extremely helpful.

I love how I can use AI within DEVONthink Help. It has become an extremely useful tool and has saved me from posting multiple times on the forum. If I can’t find what I need, I ask the AI, which provides very accurate responses. Oddly enough, I find this conversation to be persistent. Scrolling through previous responses has been very helpful.

The above has highlighted some issues, but I don’t want that to overshadow my appreciation for the work and support of integrating (public) AI into DT4.

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Excellent topic. How are you using the built-in AI?

I use AI daily but I almost always use it from the ChatGPT app. I haven’t really found much use for DT’s built-in AI.

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I’m not sure where you are using Shift-Return but Option-Return has been used in macOS for a long time, in many apps.

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I forgot about trying option. Every app I’ve used has also allowed shift-return, which seems to have become my default. I’ll endeavor to remember to use the option key

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I use it for a variety of things. Summarizing documents, merging documents, creating documents, chatting about various topics related to documents, having it parse through text and create an action list, etc. Sometimes I’ll use it for random general questions.

One recent example… I found I had 5 documents that all seemed to contain the same information, but they were not marked as duplicates in DT (though I don’t know why). I told Claude I wanted it to compare the docs and merge them into one, highlighting which had the format I preferred and specifically to not lose any information. Saved much time from doing it manually.

Currently, the tasks I use it for in DT4 tend to be “one offs” because they are not persistent. For persistent chats, I’ve been using BoltAI.

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Only the detachable chat popover (see Tools > Chat or the Chat toolbar item) is currently persistent. But additional options are already planned for upcoming releases.

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For recurring tasks, the Chat - Query action of smart rules & batch processing might be useful in this case as it supports custom roles

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It’s not really a recurring task, though I can see how that could be useful. I looked at creating a new smart rule, thinking I could get it to apply a role to any AI chat from the sidebar when in a certain group, but I didn’t see how.

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Only the Chat - Query action of smart rules (not smart groups) supports roles. But the role is only used by this action and doesn’t affect the chat assistant or other features.

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LOL I meant rule. Edited post.