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Cognoir adapts how it parses, retrieves, and cites to the specialism of each knowledge base — academic papers, legal documents, Quran and Hadith, medical literature, financial filings, and more. You choose the specialism when you create a knowledge base, and you can change it later in that knowledge base's settings.

The specialism is what makes a citation come back in the form your field expects: a page and section for a book, surah and ayah for the Quran, collection and number for a Hadith, jurisdiction and paragraph for case law. Not sure which to pick? Leave it on General — every format falls back to a clean filename-and-excerpt citation.

Inside a knowledge base, drag files onto the upload area or click to browse. Cognoir accepts PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, plain text, Markdown, CSV, and images (JPG, PNG, WebP), up to 50 MB per file. Images are read with OCR. You can also paste a public web page URL or a YouTube link to ingest the page text or the video's transcript.

Each document then moves through processing — text extraction, chunking, and indexing — and shows Processing, then Ready (or Error if something went wrong). You can start asking questions the moment a document is Ready; you don't have to wait for the whole library.

Open a knowledge base and ask in plain language, the way you'd ask a colleague — “What does the contract say about the termination notice period?” rather than a keyword search. The answer streams back in real time, grounded only in the documents in that knowledge base.

To focus on specific documents, @mention them in your question or use the source selector to scope the chat to a subset. Everything outside that selection is ignored for the answer.

Every answer cites the exact passages behind it. A “sources cited” line sits under the response; click a source to expand the quoted passage, its surrounding context, and a citation formatted in your field's convention.

This is the point of Cognoir — you verify the claim against the source in a click or two, rather than trusting a summary. If a passage doesn't actually support the statement, you'll see it immediately.

From your dashboard, create a knowledge base, give it a name, and pick its specialism. A knowledge base is a self-contained library: a chat only ever sees the documents inside the one you're working in, so your case files never bleed into your coursework.

Your workspace starts with an “Untitled” knowledge base you can rename; after that, create as many as your plan allows.

Each knowledge base can carry custom instructions — a short standing prompt that steers every answer in it. Use it to set tone, audience, or focus: “Explain like a tutor to a first-year student,” or “Always cite the jurisdiction and flag conflicting authorities.”

Set it in the knowledge base's settings. It applies to every question asked there until you change it.

On the Team plan you can share a knowledge base with other people by email and give each one a role — viewer, editor, admin, or owner — so access matches how your team actually works. A knowledge base shared with you appears under “Shared with me.”

Your own conversations, generated study materials, and progress stay private to you, even inside a shared knowledge base.

By default a question searches the whole knowledge base. To narrow it, @mention specific documents in your question, or pick a subset with the source selector before you ask. Cognoir then retrieves and cites only from those sources.

This helps when a knowledge base is large and you want an answer grounded in, say, a single statute or one chapter rather than everything.

From a knowledge base, generate a deck of flashcards drawn from your own documents — question-and-answer pairs written from the actual content, not generic facts. Work through the deck and your progress is saved, so you can pick up where you left off.

Generate a quiz from your library to test yourself before an exam. The questions come from your documents; you answer them, and Cognoir records each attempt so you can see what you've mastered and what to revisit.

Turn a report or a set of documents into a slide deck. Cognoir drafts the structure and the content from your sources, and you can export the result to finish in your own slides tool.

Extract a structured table from across a body of documents — for example, pulling the same fields out of many filings or papers into one comparable table. Each row traces back to the source it came from.

Delete means delete. Removing a document deletes the file from storage and its text from the search index in the same operation — no soft deletes, no shadow copies. Once it's gone, it can't appear in any future answer.

You can request a full export of your data at any time. Your documents are yours: Cognoir processes them to provide the service and never uses them to train AI models — ours or our providers'.

Cognoir has three plans — Starter, Pro, and Team — each with a 14-day free trial that needs no credit card. Manage your plan, watch your usage, and update payment details under Settings → Billing.

You can close your account from Settings → Account. Deletion is irreversible: it removes your documents, knowledge bases, conversations, and generated content. The only thing retained is a short record that the deletion happened — it holds no document content and exists for accountability, for one year.