Ask AI & Summaries

Two AI features that sit inside discussion groups — a question box over the whole archive, and on-demand summaries of long threads.

Discussion groups accumulate. After a couple of years the answer to "when did we change that, and why?" is in a thread nobody remembers the title of. fellos has two features for exactly that: Ask AI, which answers a question in plain words and shows you which posts it got the answer from, and Summarize, which condenses one long thread on request.

Both work from discussion-group content. Ask AI calls itself the group archive and footnotes every answer "AI-generated from group posts"; Summarize works on one thread — a post and its comments.

Finding Ask AI

Click Groups in the left sidebar. At the top of the Groups page are three small controls in a row. They are icons with no words next to them, so they are easiest to identify by position and shape — left to right:

• Search posts — a magnifying glass. Opens the group search (see Searching).
• Ask AI — a sparkles icon. Opens the page described on the rest of this page.
• New post — a plus sign. Opens the composer (see Creating a Post).

Those three names are what a screen reader announces for them. Nothing is written beside the icons on screen, and there is no tooltip on hover, so the middle one — the sparkles — is the one to remember.

Clicking Ask AI opens a page headed Ask the group archive, with one line under the heading: "Ask a question and get an AI answer grounded in — and citing — real posts you can read." Back at the top returns you to where you came from.

Asking a question

The page is deliberately plain. It holds a question box and an Ask button, and nothing else:

1. Type your question into the box. It is labelled Your question, and the example it shows you is "e.g. When did we last change the bylaws, and what changed?" — so a whole question, not a couple of keywords.
2. Click Ask. The button stays greyed out until there is something in the box.
3. Wait for the answer to appear below the box.

There is no group picker, no date range, and no list of suggested questions to choose from. You do not narrow the search yourself — you ask, and fellos goes looking.

Reading the answer

The answer appears as a short piece of prose with numbered markers in it, like #1. Each marker is a link: click it and you land on the post that the sentence came from. An answer can name who wrote a post or who commented on it, not just what was said.

Under the answer is a list headed SOURCES. Every entry in it is a link, so anything the answer leans on is a post you can open and read in full. Each source shows:

• Its number, matching the marker in the answer.
• The post title, as a link to the thread.
• The group it was posted in, as a link to that group.
• by <author> and the date the post was written.
• A percentage.
• An excerpt from the post.

The excerpt is a raw slice of the post's text rather than a tidied-up preview, so it can show formatting markup — coloured text, bold markers and the like — spelled out in the middle of a sentence. The real post reads normally; click through to it.

The last line under the sources reads "AI-generated from group posts · verify against the cited sources."

When there is nothing to cite

If the archive does not hold an answer, Ask AI tells you so in prose, and may list the terms it looked for. No SOURCES list appears at all, and the last line changes to "AI-generated · no matching posts to cite."

That is not an error and nothing has gone wrong. It means either the topic was never discussed in a group you can read, or it was discussed in words different enough that the search missed it — worth a second try with different wording.

One question at a time

Ask AI is not a chat. There is no reply box under the answer, no follow-up thread, and no list of questions you asked before. Asking again simply replaces the answer that is on screen.

Your question does stay in the box after you ask, which makes rewording it and asking again easy. But once you navigate away, nothing on the page remembers the exchange — so if an answer is worth keeping, copy it out, or better, note which post it cited.

What gets recorded

Each use of Ask AI is written to your site's audit log, with your name and the time you asked. The entry records that you used it: the question and the answer are not shown on it, there is nothing on the entry to expand or open, and no screen in fellos shows a member's past questions.

Answering a question means sending it, and the posts and comments it draws on, to the AI provider fellos contracts with. Each post and comment goes with the name of the member who wrote it, which is how an answer can tell you who wrote a post or left a comment. Your group discussions are not used to train AI models. Security & data handling on the main fellos site sets out what is sent and what stays in fellos.

Summaries of long threads

The second feature works on a single discussion at a time. When your organization has summaries switched on and a thread is long enough, a Summarize button appears on it. Summaries are generated on demand rather than in advance, and a summary is kept and refreshed when the thread moves on.

The button only appears when both of these are true:

• Your site has summaries switched on. It is a setting your site admin controls, described there as "on-demand AI summaries of group post threads". The setting also notes that it "requires AI to be configured" for your site, which is a separate piece of setup.
• The thread is long enough. Your site sets a minimum thread length in words, counting the post and its comments together. The default is 400 words. Below that, the button does not appear — the reasoning being that a shorter thread is quicker to read than to summarize.

Summaries are generated on demand: nothing is summarized until a member asks for it. Once a summary exists it is cached, and — in the words of the setting itself — "refreshed when the thread changes", so a summary does not go stale behind a conversation that has moved on.