Ask your notes a question with AI search that cites its sources

You can ask your notes a question in Barside and get a straight answer with its sources. Type “What did we decide about the pricing page?” and Barside’s AI search looks through your notes, saved articles, bookmarks, call transcripts and screenshots on your computer, picks the passages that match, and asks the AI you connected to answer from those passages only. The answer cites its sources like [S1], and every source opens with one click. If your library does not hold the answer, it says what is missing instead of guessing.

AI search lives in Library & briefing in Barside, a free desktop app for Windows, Linux and Mac. The search runs on your computer. The answer is written by Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or OpenRouter, whichever you connect in Settings → AI.

How AI search answers a question

An answer takes two steps, and only the second one uses AI.

1. Search, on your computer. Barside splits your included notes and sources into passages and scores each one against the words in your question. Rare words count more than common ones, long passages do not win by length alone, words in a title count a little extra, and a plural finds its singular (“meetings” finds “meeting”). It keeps the six best passages, with at most two from any one note or bookmark. There is no model, no download and no index to build: it reads your current library each time.
2. Answer, with the AI you connected. Barside sends your question and those passages, and nothing else from your library, to your AI. The AI is told to answer only from them and to cite each factual sentence with its source number.

Barside checks the answer before you see it. A citation that points to no real source, or an answer with no citations at all, is set aside, and you see “I could not produce a reliably cited answer” above the closest excerpts, so you can read them yourself. If a note changed while the AI was writing, Barside asks you to ask again, so an answer never quotes text that is gone.

What AI search can find

• Notes: titles and text, checklists, text in drawings, and the text your computer read in screen captures and images (see copy text from the screen).
• Reading: the articles and newsletters in your read-it-later inbox, which are notes too.
• Bookmarks: titles and addresses from every note and workspace bookmark bar, plus the page text when you saved it.
• Transcripts: call transcripts and the notes of Barside video meetings, marked Transcript in the results.
• Screenshots: images in your notes, once you choose Read screenshots with AI in Sources.
• Research: the pages the research agent read, saved as bookmarks with their text.

Barside never crawls your browsing history. The password vault, saved AI keys, the assistant’s memory and the account names on bookmarks are never searched.

How to ask your notes a question

1. Open Library & briefing in the sidebar, the book icon at the top of Barside (Ask library & daily briefing), or Library & daily briefing on the desktop bar. From any app, press Alt+Shift+Space, type ask and choose Ask your library.
2. Stay on the Ask library tab and type your question in Ask your entire library. It can be up to 2,000 characters.
3. Press Ask library. A progress line shows what Barside is doing, and Stop cancels.
4. Read the answer under From your library. Each source card shows its number, its kind (Note, Transcript, Bookmark, Saved webpage or Screenshot) and its workspace, with the excerpt the answer used.
5. Click a source’s title to open the note, or the bookmarked page in your browser.

You can also ask the AI assistant (Ctrl+Shift+A) in your own words, typed or spoken, such as “Find the tool I saved that handles LinkedIn outreach.” It searches the same way and offers Read answer & sources.

Questions that work well

AI search is best at questions whose answer sits in a few passages you saved:

• Decisions: “What did we decide about the launch date?”
• Promises and owners: “What did Maya say she would send?”
• Things you saved once: “Which tool did I bookmark for scheduling posts?”
• Where an idea came from: “Which article said to keep the pricing page to three plans?”
• Details buried in a call: “What budget did the client mention?”

Some questions belong to another tool. “Summarize everything I wrote this year” needs far more than six passages, so ask about one project or topic at a time, or let a scheduled agent write a weekly review of what changed in your notes. “What needs me today?” is the job of the daily briefing. A question about the wider web goes to the research agent, which saves its sources so AI search can use them next time.

Tips for better answers

• Use the words your notes use. Search matches words, not meaning, so “invoice” will not find a note that only says “bill”. If the first answer misses, ask again with the name of the client, project or person.
• Skip very short words. Words of one or two letters, such as “Q3” or “AI”, are not matched. Add a longer word from the note: “Q3 budget” finds notes with “budget”.
• Ask one thing at a time. Six passages is a small window. A focused question fills it with the right ones.
• Give bookmarks their text. A bookmark alone is a title and an address. In Sources → Save webpage content, choose it and press Download public page text, or paste the text of a page you are signed in to and press Save this text. Up to 120,000 characters are kept. If the bookmark’s address changes, save its text again.
• Let AI read your screenshots. Read screenshots with AI sends the images in your included notes to your AI once and saves a description of each, so a chart or a photo of a whiteboard becomes searchable. Pick a model that can see images, and open the original when it matters, because descriptions can contain mistakes.
• Record the calls you want to search. A transcript becomes searchable like any other note.

Choose what AI search can see

The Sources tab is your control panel. Under Choose included workspaces & notes, untick a whole workspace or single notes. Excluded items stay out of Library answers, screenshot reading, meeting analysis and the daily briefing, and agents never receive them. The Search card shows how many passages are searchable, how many bookmarks have saved page text, and how many screenshots are waiting to be read.

Exclude any note that holds something sensitive, such as a pasted recovery code. Text typed into an included note can be found and sent to your AI as an excerpt.

Examples

• A product manager asks “What did we decide about the pricing page?” The answer cites the weekly sync transcript for the launch date and a saved article for the number of plans.
• A freelancer asks “Which tool did I save for invoices?” and the answer points to a bookmark from last year, with the page text she saved.
• A researcher asks which saved articles mention a method, then opens both sources to check the exact words before quoting them.
• A student transcribes an online lecture and later asks what was said about an exam topic. The excerpt shows the timestamped line.

Privacy: what leaves your computer

• The search runs on your computer, with nothing to download.
• When you ask, your question and the matching excerpts go to the AI company you connected: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google or OpenRouter. That company’s data policy applies.
• Read screenshots with AI sends each included screenshot to your AI once, and the description it returns is saved with the note.
• Saved page text and screenshot descriptions are part of your library and its ZIP backups.
• Excluding a note later cannot take back an excerpt that was already sent to an AI company.

Read more in how AI search uses your data and the AI you connect.

Use your library from Claude or ChatGPT

If you prefer to ask in Claude Desktop, ChatGPT or another MCP app, AI connections let that app search and read the workspaces you choose, with the search_notes and get_note tools. New connections are read-only by default, never delete anything, and cannot see your passwords or the assistant’s memory.

Which Barside search to use

The search bar matches titles and text as you type, so it is the fastest way to open something you can name. AI search is for when you remember the idea but not where you put it.

How it compares

Barside’s AI search runs its search on your computer, uses the AI account you already have, and shows the exact excerpts behind every answer. It works the same on Windows 10 and 11, on Linux and in Barside for Mac. Text in images is read by Windows’ own text recognition on Windows, by Tesseract on Linux and by Apple Vision on a Mac.

If you are choosing a second brain, read the Obsidian alternative and Notion alternative guides, or the list of the best second brain apps.

Works well with