Ask the Book

Some questions only come up mid-book. Who was this minor character again? What did the author say about this in chapter two? Did the methods section ever state the sample size? The traditional answers are flipping backwards, the index (if there is one), or giving up — and the modern answer, pasting chunks of a book into a chatbot, is clumsy for you and a quiet privacy leak for the book.

A reading app is the right place for this to live, because the app already has what a general chatbot doesn't: the full text, your position in it, and its structure.

Why scoping is the feature that matters

"Chat with your book" demos usually show the whole-book case, but the scoped question is the workhorse. Asking the chapter you just read what it claimed is a comprehension check. Asking the chapter ahead whether it covers a topic is triage — the difference between reading forty pages to find out and knowing in ten seconds. Asking the whole book is for synthesis and for the "where did I see that?" retrievals that indexes were never good at. Velo lets you choose the scope per question, which turns Q&A from a novelty into three distinct reading tools.

Grounding matters just as much: answers come from what's on the page, not from the model's general knowledge of the world. When you ask a book what it says, you want that book's answer — including when the honest answer is that it doesn't address the topic.

On your device, which is the whole trick

Velo's Q&A runs on Apple Intelligence, on your hardware. The book is never uploaded to answer a question — not to us, not to a model provider. For a bestseller this is a nicety; for an unpublished manuscript, a legal document, or a report you're not free to share, it's the difference between a usable tool and a compliance incident. It's the same on-device architecture as the rest of Velo's intelligence dashboard — summaries, classification, entities — and the same reason those features are free: on-device inference has no server bill to pass on.

The honest requirement: this needs an Apple Intelligence-capable device — macOS 26 or a current iPhone. On older hardware the reading experience is untouched, but Q&A isn't available; that's the real boundary of on-device AI today, and we'd rather state it than let you discover it.

Part of a reader, not a chatbot with a bookshelf

Q&A earns its place because it sits inside an app built for the reading itself: your own DRM-free EPUBs and PDFs (restructured on import so chapters and sections are real, which is what makes chapter-scoping possible), a typeset Reader mode, the RSVP focus stream, and one reading position across all of it — stored locally, readable offline.

The free tier includes the dashboard and Q&A alongside both reading modes and 3 imported books. Bring a book you half-remember and ask it the question you've been carrying around — that first retrieval is usually the moment the feature stops sounding like a demo.

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