Asking a collection questions
The one rule that decides whether collections work for you at all.
Say the collection's name in your message. Asteria cannot guess which one you mean, and it will not go looking through all of them on the off chance.
That is the whole page, really. The rest is why, and the ways round it.
Why it cannot guess
You may have a dozen collections. "What does the contract say about termination?" does not tell Asteria whether to look in Supplier Contracts, Employment Documents or the Legal Archive, and quietly searching all of them would be slow, expensive and wrong more often than right.
So it does the honest thing: it uses what you name.
Works:
What do the Supplier Contracts say about early termination penalties?
Using Brand Guidelines, check whether this landing page copy is on tone.
Compare our messaging in Product Marketing with what the Competitor Research collection says they claim.
Does not work:
What does my contract say about termination?
Check the collection for our tone of voice.
Search my documents for the renewal date.
The second group is not wrong exactly. Asteria will answer, but from the conversation and its general knowledge, not from your documents. That is the failure people describe as "it made something up": it was never looking at the file.
Getting it right without thinking about it
Two ways to stop having to remember:
Pin the collection to a workspace. Every conversation in that workspace can search the pinned collections without you naming them. This is the right answer for a project you are living in.
Give an agent its collections. An agent carries its collections with it, so "ask the Contracts Assistant" and it already knows where to look. This is the right answer for a job you do repeatedly.
Outside those two cases, name it.
What you get back
Asteria retrieves the passages that bear on your question, uses them to answer, and cites the documents it drew on. Open the sources to confirm anything that matters.
If it cannot find anything relevant, it says so rather than inventing an answer. That is a genuine signal worth heeding: either the document is not in that collection, or your wording is far from the document's own.
When the answer looks wrong
"It didn't find something I know is in there." Try the words the document itself would use. Search matches meaning, but it still leans on vocabulary, and internal jargon that appears nowhere in the text will not surface it.
"It ignored my spreadsheet." Spreadsheets and CSVs are not searchable by design. Ask the question you actually want answered ("what was total spend by region") rather than a keyword, and Asteria will compute over the file. See the two kinds of file.
"It only used one document." Say so: "check every document in the collection, not just the closest match". For a genuinely exhaustive pass over a large collection, say that explicitly.
"It answered from the wrong collection." Two collections with similar names is the usual cause. Rename one.