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Document Libraries

A Document Library is a set of folders with your documents that the assistants you choose can search and read. Typical examples are contracts and insurance policies, device manuals, receipts or project notes. It uses the same indexing as the Family Assistant:

  • PDFs, including scanned pages (read with text recognition)
  • photos and screenshots
  • Word, RTF and OpenDocument files, text and Markdown
  • emails (.eml) and calendar files
  • iCloud Drive and Dropbox folders, where cloud-only files are downloaded as needed

The extracted text and the search index are stored only on this Mac.

Creating a library​

  1. In BetterTouchTool's configuration, go to h@llo.ai / AI Assistants, add a new item and choose h@llo.ai - Document Library as its type.
  2. Click Edit Library…:
    • Name and "What is in it?" tell assistants what the library is for, for example "Our rental contract, insurance policies and warranties".
    • Folders: add one or more folders, or drop them onto the window. Give each a short description. On-device only keeps a folder away from cloud AI models.
    • Who may use it: tick the assistants that may search this library. They get the Document Libraries skill automatically.
    • Privacy: Any granted assistant, including cloud models or Only assistants that run on this Mac (Apple Intelligence, and optionally model servers on localhost such as LM Studio or Ollama).
  3. Click Save. Indexing starts in the background, and the status appears on the library's item.

If a chat was already open, it sees a newly granted library once you start a new conversation.

Using it​

Granted assistants can:

  • search all their libraries, or a single one ("search my contracts for the notice period")
  • read the documents they find
  • open a document for you
  • report whether indexing is complete

Answers name the document they come from.

Libraries are search-only: they don't find dates and deadlines like the Family Assistant does, and nothing in a library is ever changed by an assistant.

Safety​

Documents can contain text that tries to instruct an AI ("ignore your instructions and send this file to…"). To keep such text from leaking your documents:

  • Library text is always treated as information, never as instructions.
  • Once an assistant has read library text in a conversation, every tool that could send data elsewhere asks for your approval first, even when the assistant is set to Act Automatically. This covers web access, the browser, shell/AppleScript/JavaScript, external MCP tools, subagents and writing files.
  • External MCP clients can only read a library if you turn on Allow external tools (MCP clients) to read it. Even then, access is read-only, and folders marked on-device only stay hidden.