Knowledge Base & RAG
The Knowledge Base lets you upload your own documents and get answers grounded in your material — with citations you can verify. This is what makes SeekPrep's AI tutor useful for actual coursework, not just generic Q&A.
How it works
- Upload a document (PDF, image, slides, or text).
- SeekPrep indexes the content — extracts text, OCRs images, splits into searchable chunks.
- When you ask a related question in chat, the tutor retrieves the most relevant chunks.
- The answer is grounded in those chunks, with citations pointing back to the source section.
This is called RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) — the tutor isn't making things up, it's reading your material first.
Supported file formats
- PDF — including scanned PDFs (OCR runs automatically).
- Images — JPG, PNG; text is extracted via OCR.
- Text files —
.txt,.md, plain text pasted into chat. - Slides & documents — most common document formats convert on upload.
Larger files take longer to index. Very large PDFs may be split into sections during indexing.
Citations & verification
Whenever the tutor uses your Knowledge Base to answer, the response includes
citations like [Doc: chapter-3, p.12]. Click a citation to:
- Jump to the source section in the original document.
- Read the surrounding context the tutor used.
- Confirm the answer matches what your source actually says.
If a citation looks wrong or the answer seems off, follow up in chat: "show me the exact quote you used" or "where did you get that number?"
Managing your Knowledge Base
Open the Knowledge page to:
- List everything you've uploaded.
- Open any document to read it inline.
- Delete a document — the tutor will no longer be able to retrieve from it. Existing chat history that referenced the document remains visible.
Tips
- One source per question. If you're studying from multiple textbooks, upload both — the tutor will cite whichever is more relevant per claim.
- OCR quality matters. For handwritten or low-quality scans, expect some retrieval errors. Use clean PDFs or re-type key sections.
- Refresh after edits. If you update a document locally, re-upload it — SeekPrep doesn't auto-sync with your filesystem.
Privacy & isolation
Your uploads are encrypted at rest and isolated per user. No other account can read your documents or query them through their tutor. See Account → Data privacy & security for the full policy.