From notes to answers: how Ask Ona cites its sources
Ask a general chatbot what your team decided about pricing and it will give you something fluent, plausible, and unverifiable. Ask Ona the same question and you get an answer with receipts: the meetings it came from, linked to the exact moments in the transcript.
That difference is the whole product. This post walks through how it works, in plain English, and why we think an answer you can check changes how you use one.
| Question | A general chatbot | Ask Ona |
|---|---|---|
| What did we agree on pricing? | A fluent paragraph with no source | The meeting, the date, and the line where it was said |
| Did the client agree to the new deadline? | A confident guess based on typical deals | The exact moment they said yes, or a note that it never came up |
An answer you can check
Every Ask Ona answer is grounded in your own meetings. When Ona tells you "you agreed to hold the price until Q2," it also tells you where that came from: the meeting name, the date, and a link to the moment it was said. Tap the citation and you land in the transcript, on the exact line.
If your meetings do not contain the answer, Ona says so. A clean "that didn't come up in your meetings" is more useful than a confident invention, because you can act on it: ask the person, book the call, check the doc.
What happens when you ask
Under the hood, a question makes a short journey through your memory:
- Ona searches your transcripts and notes for the passages most relevant to the question, across every meeting you have recorded.
- It reads those passages in context: who was speaking, when the meeting happened, and what was decided around them.
- It writes the answer from those passages alone, not from what a model assumes teams like yours usually decide.
- It attaches the sources, so each claim in the answer points back to the meeting and moment that supports it.
Recency matters too. When two meetings disagree, and in real work they often do, the newer decision wins the summary, and the citation trail still shows you the older one, so you can see how the plan changed.
Checking an answer, step by step
- Read the citationEach claim links to a meeting name, a date, and a moment in the transcript.
- Open the momentTap the citation and you land on that line in the transcript.
- Compare the wordsRead what was actually said and decide whether it matches what the answer claims.
- Act or follow upShare the source with a client, correct the record, or ask a quick follow-up question if something is missing.
Why citations change how you work
The first thing citations buy you is speed, oddly enough. When you can verify an answer in one tap, you stop double-checking everything the slow way. You ask, you glance at the source, you move.
The second thing is safety in the moments that matter. Before you tell a client what they agreed to, you can look at the sentence where they agreed to it. The answer stops being Ona's word and becomes the meeting's word, which is the one that counts.
I do not tell a client what they agreed to until I have looked at the line where they agreed to it. That one habit has saved us from two very awkward calls this quarter.
Priya N., Head of Customer Success, fintech scale-up
The limits, stated plainly
Grounding is not magic. Ona can only cite what was recorded, so the decision made in a hallway stays unrecorded until someone says it in a meeting. Transcripts occasionally mishear a name, and a correction from you fixes the memory going forward. And a citation proves where an answer came from, not that the person quoted was right.
Those limits are why citations exist. We would rather show you the source and let you judge it than hide the uncertainty behind a fluent paragraph. Memory you can check is memory you can actually rely on, and that is the standard we hold every answer to.