Using Almanac Chat

Go from question to usable result

Almanac is a clinical assistant you work with in plain language:

• Start with a question, a patient, a document, rough notes, or a task you have to finish.
• Ask it to explain something, search the evidence, read what you have attached, work through a decision with you, draft a document, or check its own reasoning.
• Give it the context and the tools the task needs: files, your Library, the patient, the plugins you have turned on.
• Read the result, correct the direction, and ask for changes. You do not need a perfect first message, and there is no syntax to learn.

What Almanac can do

Ask it to:

• Find and weigh evidence. Search published literature and active trials, run clinical calculators, check a drug against a reference, and search the web when the answer is not in the literature. Answers carry citations you can open. See Plugins.
• Work from your own material. Read and compare documents, annotate a PDF, question a spreadsheet as a table, and open a DICOM study in a real viewer. See Files.
• Work inside the chart. With your EHR connected, pull a patient's context into the conversation. The connection reads and never writes back. See Patients.
• Produce finished files. Draft and revise documents, decks, and spreadsheets, show you a diff of every edit it makes, and keep versions you can restore.
• Analyze and compute. Run code against your data, and render charts and interactive views inside the reply.
• Listen and speak. Dictate into the composer, hold the conversation out loud, or record a visit and work from the transcript. See Voice.
• Repeat a way of working. Teach it a procedure once as a skill, and reuse it. See Plugins and skills.
• Remember what matters. Keep standing facts about you and about each patient, and see or delete any of it. See Personalization.

What you can reach depends on your plan, your organization's settings, and the plugins you have turned on.

Where things live

The sidebar holds New conversation (Shift+Cmd+O), your Library, the Plugins store, and your history. Search is Cmd+K from anywhere, and it covers your conversations, your patient list, and, with an EHR connected, the EHR itself. Your account and Settings sit at the bottom.

The composer is where you type and also the controls for the turn: / for commands, @ to point at a plugin, a tool, or a file, the model and reasoning controls, and the microphone. You can keep typing while a response runs, and what you send is picked up by the turn in progress rather than starting a new one. The ring beside the composer shows how full the conversation's context is; /compact frees the space while keeping what mattered.

The side panel opens on the right whenever there is something to look at: Files for what you uploaded and what Almanac produced, Revisions for a diff of every edit, Memory for what it has kept, and side conversations forked from this one with /btw. Tabs reorder, and the panel resizes by dragging its edge.

Talk to Almanac plainly

Write the way you would explain the request to a colleague. Say what you are trying to accomplish, add the details that change the answer, and describe the form you want it back in. The first message is a starting point, not a specification.

You can steer with something as short as:

• "Make it shorter."
• "Give me three approaches."
• "What are you assuming?"
• "Ask me questions before you continue."
• "Where is the evidence weakest?"

See Prompting.

Bring the right context in

Give Almanac what changes the answer, rather than everything you have.

• Attach the files for this question. Drop them on the composer, or type @ to point at one you have already used.
• Put what you always use in your Library. A protocol, a formulary, a template. Library files are available in every conversation.
• Bind the patient when the work is about one person. Almanac loads their records from your EHR and adds them to the conversation as context.
• Turn on the plugins the task needs, and leave the rest off. A model choosing between four relevant tools chooses better than one facing twenty.

You're always in control

Next steps