How to Do Q&A Over Your Documents (With Citations)

Document Q&A means asking a file a question in plain language — “What changed in version 3?” — and getting an answer drawn from its content, instead of scrolling pages or guessing keywords with Ctrl+F. Done well, the answer points back to the exact passage it came from.

Under the hood it's retrieval-augmented generation: each document is split into passages, the ones most relevant to your question are retrieved, and a language model writes an answer grounded in them. We explain the mechanism in our RAG explainer.

1. Create a project and upload your files (or paste a link).
2. Wait a few seconds while each document is read and indexed.
3. Ask a question in plain language.
4. Read the answer and click the citations to verify it.

An answer you can't check isn't much use for real work. Because Doxyanswers only from the documents you provide and shows the passages it used, you can confirm every claim. That's the difference between AI document chat grounded in your sources and a chatbot that might be making things up.

The real power shows up with a whole project: Doxy retrieves the most relevant passages from across every file, so you can compare and cross-reference in one question. Try it whether you chat with a single PDF or run Q&A over many documents together.