Documents in ambientChat aren't just receipts and manuals that you scan. You can create your own — notes, lists, plans, meal prep schedules, gift ideas, anything you want to write down and have your AI remember. Think of it as a notebook that your AI can actually read.

#What It Does

Beyond storing receipts and product manuals, ambientChat lets you create and manage your own markdown documents. These documents become part of your AI context — searchable, queryable, and available whenever you ask your AI assistant a question.

Markdown is a simple formatting language. If you've ever used **bold** or # heading in a message, you already know the basics. Your documents can have headings, bullet lists, tables, links, and any structure you need. They can also carry YAML frontmatter — structured metadata like title, tags, category, and version — that makes them easy to organize and find later.

Every document you create is processed for semantic search. This means your AI can find your documents by meaning, not just by the exact words you used. Write a packing list for "beach vacation" and your AI will find it when you later ask about "trip to the coast."

#What You Can Start From Scratch

The + button in the Documents tab offers everything you can begin yourself, each with the icon it will wear on its card:

What it makes Good for
📄 A note (.md) Formatted text with headings and lists — the everyday one
📃 A text file (.txt) Plain text, no formatting
🧮 A comma separated values table (.csv) A table you edit as text — type your own columns
🌐 A web link Keeping a page you want to come back to

Plus Scan or upload a document for anything already on paper or on your device, and New folder.

What is not there, and why. You can't start a blank PDF — nothing in the app can write one. You can't start a blank Word, Excel or PowerPoint file either, and that one is worth explaining: your AI can generate those (see Office Documents below), but nothing in ambientChat can edit them once made, so a blank one would be a file you could only look at. A .csv is the honest in-app alternative — it's a real table and the pencil edits it directly.

#How to Use It

#iOS App

Creating a document via chat:

The most natural way to create a document is to ask your AI:

  1. Open the Chat tab
  2. Ask the AI to create what you need:
    • "Create a packing list for my camping trip next weekend"
    • "Write up a shopping list based on what I'm running low on"
    • "Make a note about the plumber's visit — they fixed the kitchen sink, charged $180, and said the water heater should be replaced within a year"
  3. The AI creates the document and saves it to your chosen folder (or the default folder if you don't specify one)
  4. Find it in the Documents tab under My Things

Starting one yourself — the + button:

  1. Open the Documents tab in My Things, and open the folder you want it in
  2. Tap the + button in the bottom-right corner
  3. Choose what to make — Write a new document (a note), New Text file, New Comma separated values table, Save a web link, Scan or upload a document, or New folder
  4. A note, text file or table opens straight in the editor, named Untitled until you give it a name. A .csv starts genuinely empty — you type your own header row, because guessing your columns would be the app inventing your data

Whatever you make lands in the folder you were in, so filing happens by where you started rather than by moving it afterwards.

Uploading a file you already have:

  1. Tap +, then Scan or upload a document
  2. Pick a file from your device (or photograph a page)
  3. The file is uploaded, parsed, and indexed — ready for AI search

Editing a document by hand:

  1. Open the document and tap the pencil in the top bar — it's always there, so you never have to scroll to the bottom of a long note to find it
  2. Type in the editor, or use the formatting bar above it — headings, bold, italic, strikethrough, code, bullet list, numbered list, quote. Tags sit below the text, out of your way until you want them
  3. Tap Done in the top bar to save. ✕ closes the editor without saving — but it does not throw your typing away: it's kept as a draft on your phone

Everything else a document can do — move it, print it, export it, change its type, undo the last saved change, delete it — lives behind the ⋯ button in the same top bar.

#Web

Starting one yourself:

  1. Go to the Documents section and open the folder you want it in
  2. Click New Document to write a note, or the chevron beside it to choose a text file, a table, or a web link. On a phone-width window the same choices sit behind the + button, bottom-right
  3. A note, text file or table opens straight in the editor

Uploading files you already have:

  1. Click Upload
  2. Select one or more files
  3. Documents are processed and appear in the current folder

The web interface also supports drag-and-drop: just drag a file onto a folder to upload it there directly.

Editing a document by hand:

  1. Open the document and click Edit
  2. Type in the editor, or use the formatting bar above it — headings, bold, italic, strikethrough, code, link, bullet list, numbered list, quote. Tags sit below the text, out of your way until you want them
  3. Click Done to save. Close leaves the editor without saving, keeping what you typed as a draft in that browser

Occasional actions — undo or redo the last saved change, and on a narrow window Ask AI and Share — live behind the ⋯ button in the header.

#Keeping a Web Page

A page you want to come back to can live in your library like anything else — a recipe, a product page, a council form, a manual that only exists on someone's website.

On the phone: tap +, then Save a web link, and paste the address. On the web: the chevron beside New Document (or the + on a narrow window), then Web link.

You do not need to type https://. theverge.com is a web address and is treated as one — we fill in the rest. The same goes for a scanned tag: QR codes and NFC tags very often leave the https:// off (it is an abbreviation the NFC standard is built around), and those are kept as pages too. You only see a complaint if what you pasted or scanned isn't an address at all. If it already says http://, we keep it exactly as you wrote it.

We fetch the page's own title and picture, so the card looks like the page rather than like a URL, and the page's text becomes part of your AI context — ask about it later and your AI can answer from what the page actually said.

Saving the same address twice opens what you already have. A link is identified by its address, so re-saving one you've kept before takes you to that document instead of making a second copy. That is what makes a title you typed survive: rename a saved page to "Dishwasher manual" and it stays that, however many times the address turns up again.

One caveat worth knowing. A scanned tag is saved under the address the site finally lands on, while a typed one is saved under exactly what you typed. Most of the time those are the same thing — but for a site that redirects (theverge.com sends you to www.theverge.com), typing the address and scanning a tag for it can leave you with two documents for the one page. Scanning the same tag twice, or typing the same address twice, is always one document.

You can change the address later. Open a saved page and edit its link like a bookmark — useful when a site moves a page. It has to be an ordinary web address; anything else is refused.

A product tag is still a product. If the code carries a GS1 Digital Link — the kind on a supermarket item — it is read as the product it identifies rather than kept as a web page, whether or not it spelled out its https://.

#Your Typing Is Kept As You Type It

You do not have to remember to save. Everything you write into a document is stored on your phone (or in your browser) every couple of seconds, so wandering off mid-note, switching apps, or having the app close on you does not lose it.

Come back and it's all there, in plain sight. Open the document and you see your unsaved notes straight away — you do not have to go back into the editor to check. A bar across the top says when they were written, and offers Resume editing or Discard:

Unsaved changes from 6:59 PM — shown below. Not saved yet, so your AI can't see them. Resume editing · Discard

The name you gave it sticks too. Type a title and that is what the document is called everywhere — the header, and its row in the Documents tab — even before you have saved. A note called "Standup — 21 Aug" never has to look like an anonymous "Untitled".

The Documents tab marks it. A note with unsaved work shows Draft on its row, so you can see at a glance which ones you left half-finished without opening each in turn.

To throw the changes away on purpose, press Discard — in that bar, or in the editor. That is the rollback: it puts the document back to the last version you saved. If you discard on a note you never saved anything to, it offers to delete the empty note as well, so you're not left with an Untitled you don't want.

What "saved" still means. Until you press Done, the notes live only on the device you typed them on. Your AI cannot read them, they do not appear in search, and they will not follow you to another device. Done is what publishes them into your context — it is no longer what rescues them from being lost.

#Via Chat

Your AI assistant is your primary document author. Some examples:

Creating from scratch:

  • "Create a document called 'Home Maintenance Schedule' with sections for monthly, quarterly, and annual tasks"
  • "Write a meal plan for this week using ingredients from my pantry"
  • "Make a gift list for the holidays — I need ideas for Mom, Dad, and my sister"

Creating from your data:

  • "Summarize everything I bought at Costco this month and save it as a document"
  • "Create an inventory report of my garage for insurance purposes"
  • "Write up a comparison of the coffee makers I own"

Updating existing documents:

  • "Add 'sunscreen' to my beach packing list"
  • "Update the Home Maintenance Schedule — mark the furnace filter as done for March"
  • "Replace the 'Dinner' section of my meal plan with pasta recipes"

The AI can update documents at the section level — it can replace or append to a specific heading without touching the rest of the document.

#Via Claude Desktop (MCP)

The markdown tools give Claude Desktop full document authorship:

  • create_markdown_document — Create a new document with title, content, optional folder, and YAML frontmatter
  • update_markdown_document — Update content, or target a specific section by heading name (replace or append)
  • undo_markdown_update — Undo: step the document one change back. Repeat to keep going back
  • redo_markdown_update — Redo: step one change forward again
  • get_markdown_document — Retrieve a document's full content, metadata, and table of contents
  • list_markdown_documents — List documents filtered by folder or tags
  • search_markdown_content — Semantic search across all your markdown documents

For the full tool reference, see MCP Tools — Complete Reference.

Example: Tell Claude Desktop "Create a shopping list document in my Groceries folder with everything I need to restock from my pantry" and it will search your inventory for low or expired items, compose the list, and save it as a searchable document.

#Office Documents — Excel, Word & PowerPoint

Your AI can also build real Microsoft Office files from your data — a spreadsheet, a Word document, or a slide deck — and save them to your library just like any other document. Ask in chat (mobile, web, or a connected assistant):

  • "Make a spreadsheet of everything expiring this month" → an Excel .xlsx
  • "Give me a CSV of my inventory" → a plain .csv, ready to import into another program
  • "Write this conversation up as a Word document" → a Word .docx
  • "Build a slide deck summarizing my Kitchen view" → a PowerPoint .pptx

The AI gathers the data (your inventory, documents, or the chat itself), composes the content, and generates the file. When it's done it gives you a Download link in chat, and the file appears in your Documents tab with a format icon (📊 / 📝 / 📈). Open any Office document from its detail view and tap Download to open it in Excel, Word, PowerPoint, or any compatible app — the files are fully editable, not flattened to PDF.

A generated .csv you can fix in place. Open it and you get the table, not a download stub — and the pencil edits the file directly, so a wrong value or an unwanted row takes seconds rather than a download-edit-reupload round trip. See Editing a Document. Generated .xlsx, .docx and .pptx files are still download-to-edit: those formats carry styling and multiple sheets that a text editor can't represent honestly.

Ask for the right columns. A generated spreadsheet contains the columns the AI chose. If it gives you fewer than you wanted, say so — "add value, quantity and location" — and it will regenerate with them. For a straight dump of your own items, asking to export rather than to make a spreadsheet gets you the full column set without the AI deciding what to include.

Because the generated file lands in your library, it gets the same folders, search, and sharing as everything else — you can move it, share it by email, or find it later by asking your AI.

#Via Claude Desktop (MCP)

  • create_data_file — Generate an .xlsx, .docx, .pptx, or .csv from structured content and save it to your library. Returns a download link. Provide sheets for a spreadsheet or CSV (a CSV takes exactly one sheet — it's a single table), markdown for a Word document, or slides for a presentation.

#Document Format

Documents use Markdown with optional YAML frontmatter:

---
title: Weekend Camping Packing List
version: 1
tags: [travel, camping, outdoors]
---

# Weekend Camping Packing List

## Shelter & Sleeping
- Tent (2-person)
- Sleeping bags (2)
- Sleeping pads
- Camping pillow

## Cooking
- Portable stove
- Fuel canister
- Pot and pan set
- Plates, cups, utensils

## Clothing
- Hiking boots
- Rain jacket
- Warm layers (check weather forecast)

Frontmatter fields you can use:

Field Purpose Example
title Document title "Weekly Meal Plan"
version Version number (auto-incremented on update) 1
tags Searchable tags [recipes, shopping, meal-prep]
category Document category help, note, list, report
status Publication status draft, published

#Tips & Tricks

  • Documents appear alongside your receipts and manuals in the Documents tab. They're first-class citizens — same search, same folders, same AI context. There's no separate "notes" section to check.
  • You can take meeting notes here without watching the clock. Your typing is kept as you go and shown back to you when you return, so the only thing Done changes is that the note becomes the version your AI reads. Give it a name early — that name shows up in the list straight away, and it's how you'll find the note again.
  • Start a table when the thing is really a table. A .csv gives you rows and columns your AI can read as data — a mileage log, a price comparison, a guest list — where the same information in a note is just prose it has to interpret.
  • Keep the page, not the address. Pasting a link into a note saves you the address; Save a web link saves the page — title, picture, and text your AI can answer from later. If the site takes the page down, the note has a dead link and the saved page still has the content.
  • Use headings to structure documents for section-level updates. When you ask the AI to "update the Dinner section," it finds the ## Dinner heading and replaces just that section. Good structure makes documents easier to maintain over time.
  • Tags in frontmatter make documents easier to find. Adding tags: [travel, hawaii, 2026] to your vacation planning document means your AI can find it when you ask about any of those topics, even months later.
  • To turn typed lines into a list, select them all and press • List or 1. List. Every selected line becomes an item in one press. Press the same button again to turn the list back into plain lines, or press the other one to convert between bullets and numbers — the heading and quote buttons work the same way. This step matters because of how markdown works: lines with nothing in front of them run together into a single paragraph when the document is displayed, however many times you pressed Return. The - or 1. in front of each line is what makes it a list.
  • Once you're in a list, Return keeps it going. Press Return at the end of - Eggs and the next line starts as - already; in a numbered list it counts on — 2., 3., and so on. Press Return on an item you haven't typed anything into and the marker comes off, which is how you end the list and go back to ordinary paragraphs. Quotes carry the same way.
  • Numbering picks up where the list above it left off. Pressing 1. List on the line under 1. Flour gives you 2., not another 1. — so you can number lines one at a time and still end up with a single, correctly counted list.

#Options

Setting What It Does Default
Default folder Where new documents are saved when no folder is specified My Documents
Auto-version Whether version numbers auto-increment on update On
Embedding generation Whether documents are indexed for semantic search On

#Known Limitations

  • No rich text editor. Documents are markdown: what you edit is the source text, with the formatting syntax visible (**bold**, - bullets, ## headings). There is a formatting bar that writes that syntax for you, but you see the markers while editing and the styled version only after you save. The AI handles most of the formatting for you when it creates documents, so you rarely need to type raw markdown yourself.
  • A new table has no columns until you type them. A .csv you start from the + menu arrives genuinely empty — the first line you write is its header row. That is deliberate: seeding it with Column 1,Column 2 would be the app guessing at your data.
  • You can't start a blank PDF, Word, Excel or PowerPoint file. A PDF can't be written here at all; Office files can be generated from chat but not edited in the app, so a blank one would be a document you could only look at. For a table you want to edit, start a .csv.
  • A web address needs a dot in it. theverge.com works without the scheme; a bare machine name like localhost or an intranet host does not, because saving a page makes our server fetch it and those names only mean something on your own network.
  • An unsaved draft stays on the device you typed it on. Drafts are kept on your phone or in the browser you were using — they don't follow you to another device, and your AI can't read them, because until you press Done the saved document is still the old one. Finish a note on the device you started it on.
  • Images must be linked, not embedded. You can include image URLs in markdown (![alt](url)), but you can't paste or drag images directly into a document. For image-heavy content, use the scanning workflow instead.
  • No collaborative editing. Documents belong to one user. There's no shared editing, commenting, or version merging between users. If you need to share, export the document.
  • Section-level updates depend on heading structure. The update_markdown_document tool matches sections by heading text. If your document doesn't use headings, the entire content gets replaced. Asking to update a heading that has sub-headings beneath it is refused, because replacing it would delete those subsections too — say which subsection you mean, or ask for the whole document to be rewritten.
  • Undo and Redo work the way they do in a word processor. Say "undo that" and the document steps back one change; say it again and it steps back another (up to 19 changes are kept). "Redo" steps forward again. As soon as you make a new edit, anything you'd undone past is discarded — same as Word. Undo covers markdown documents, not generated Excel/Word/PowerPoint files.
  • Frontmatter parsing handles common cases. The YAML parser supports simple key: value pairs and arrays ([item1, item2] or - item lists). Nested objects and complex YAML structures are not supported.
  • Generated Office files are downloads, not in-app editors. A generated Excel/Word/PowerPoint file opens in Excel, Word, PowerPoint, or a compatible app — ambientChat doesn't edit them in place. To change one, ask the AI to regenerate it with the updated content (it creates a fresh file).

#Version History

Version Date What Changed
14 2026-09-18 A scanned QR or NFC tag that leaves off the https:// is kept as a page too, instead of "Not recognized" — and a scheme-less GS1 Digital Link is still read as the product it identifies
13 2026-09-13 Saving a web link no longer needs https:// — type theverge.com and it is understood. The old notice sent you back to add the scheme yourself
12 2026-09-12 The + menu offers everything you can author: a note, a .txt, a .csv table and a saved web link — each row carrying the icon its card will wear. The phone could previously start only a note. Added Keeping a Web Page, and said plainly why PDF and Office files aren't on the menu
11 2026-08-22 Your typing is kept as you type it, and shown back to you when you return — without opening the editor. The name you give a note sticks before it's saved, the Documents tab marks it Draft, Save/Cancel became Done/Close, and Discard is the deliberate rollback
9 2026-08-01 Save and Cancel moved into the top bar while editing, so you no longer scroll to the bottom of a long note to finish
8 2026-07-31 Document controls moved into the top bar: the pencil edits, ⋯ holds move/print/export/change-type/undo/delete. The old button grid at the foot of the page is gone, and tags now sit below the text you're writing
7 2026-07-31 Return continues a list (and ends it on an empty item); numbering counts on from the list above; long lines wrap in the web editor instead of running off the right edge
6 2026-07-31 Formatting bar gained a numbered-list button, and the list/heading/quote buttons now apply to every line you select (and toggle off on a second press)
5 2026-07-27 Redo added; Undo now walks back through history one change at a time (word-processor behaviour)
4 2026-07-26 Undo for document edits (undo_markdown_update); replacing a heading that has subsections now asks you to confirm what you meant
5 2026-08-10 A generated .csv opens as a table and can be edited in place — the pencil edits the file itself, and "undo that edit" puts the previous file back
4 2026-07-28 Generated files can now be plain .csv too. The tool that makes them is renamed create_data_file (it was create_office_document, which stopped being true once it made non-Office files)
3 2026-06-27 Added Office documents — generate Excel/Word/PowerPoint files from chat (create_data_file)
2 2026-06-07 Terminology: "Admin Web" → "Web" (the web interface); web upload via Scan page
1 2026-03-01 Initial guide