Creating a collection
Two fields and one decision worth thirty seconds of thought.
Open Collections and click New Collection
Collections is in the sidebar of the chat screen. New Collection is at the top of the list.
Name it something you would say out loud
This matters more than it looks. You will type this name into your messages to tell Asteria where to search, so make it short, distinctive and obvious.
Good: Supplier Contracts, Brand Guidelines, FY24 Board Packs.
Bad: Docs, Stuff, New Collection (2), Q3. A name you would have to look up is a name you will not use, and two collections whose names are near-identical are a coin toss every time you mention one.
Write a description
One line saying what is in it and what it is for. Asteria reads this, so it is genuinely useful rather than decoration: "Signed supplier agreements from 2021 onward, including amendments" tells it more than the name alone.
Decide about vision parsing
One switch: Vision parsing for PDFs and slide decks. See below, then click Create Collection.
Vision parsing, and when you want it
Normally Asteria extracts the text from a PDF or slide deck. That is fast, cheap and right for most documents.
Turn vision parsing on and it looks at each page or slide as an image instead, using a model that can see. Slower and more expensive, and much better when the meaning is in the layout rather than the words:
- Scanned documents and photographs of paper, which have no text to extract at all
- Decks where the point is in the charts
- Financial statements and anything with dense tables, where plain extraction scrambles the columns
- Documents with diagrams, floor plans or annotated screenshots
Leave it off for ordinary prose: contracts, reports, articles, policies, meeting notes. You gain nothing and pay more.
The switch only affects new uploads. Documents already in the collection keep the parsing they were added with. If you decide halfway through that you needed vision parsing, you have to delete the affected documents and upload them again.
It is available both when you create a collection and afterwards on the collection itself, so a mixed collection is possible: turn it on, upload the scans, turn it off, upload the rest.
Renaming and deleting
The menu beside the collection's name offers Share, Rename and Delete.
Renaming is safe and takes effect immediately. If you have written the old name into an agent's instructions or a workflow, update those: they will not follow the rename.
Deleting removes the collection and every document in it, permanently, and frees the storage. If the collection is shared, it disappears for everyone.