You can attach documents to a conversation with the SDLabs AI assistant, so it can read your own material — a protocol, a report, a datasheet, a notebook entry — and use it to answer your questions and help you design your experiment. Instead of retyping or summarizing a write-up, you hand the assistant the source and work from it together.
What You Can Use It For
Once a document is attached, the assistant can draw on it for the rest of the conversation:
Ground its answers in your material. Ask questions about what a document says, and the assistant answers from that document rather than from general knowledge.
Build a draft from a written protocol. Upload an experiment description and the assistant extracts the parameters, objectives, and constraints — the same design flow covered in Starting from an Existing Experiment Description, now from a file instead of pasted text.
Bring in supporting context. Attach a reference document alongside your questions so the assistant reasons with the same material you have in front of you.
How to Attach a Document
Open a conversation with the assistant — from the SDLabs front page or from any draft or running experiment.
Use the attach control in the message box to pick one or more files.
Send your message. The attached documents stay available to the assistant for the rest of that conversation, so you can keep asking about them across several turns.
Supported File Types
The assistant accepts the following formats:
PDF (
.pdf)Word (
.doc,.docx)Plain text (
.txt)Markdown (
.md)
Files in any other format are declined with a message telling you which types are allowed.
Current Limits
A few limits keep each conversation responsive. They apply per conversation:
Files per conversation | Up to 5 |
Size of a single file | Up to 4.5 MB |
Total size across all files | Up to 22.5 MB |
Total PDF pages | Up to 35 pages across all attached PDFs |
If an upload would go over one of these limits, the whole upload is declined and nothing is attached — you will see a message explaining which limit was reached, so you can remove or trim a file and try again. The same file cannot be attached to a conversation twice, and two files can't share the same name in one conversation.
Good to Know
Documents belong to the conversation. They stay attached for the life of that conversation. When you clear the conversation, the attached documents are removed with it.
PDFs are read as pages. The assistant reads a PDF the way you see it — including tables and figures laid out on the page — which is why the page budget above matters more than raw file size for PDFs.
The assistant still won't invent data. It reads what your document says; it will not fabricate measurements or claims it can't find in the material you shared. See Meet Your SDLabs AI Assistant for the full set of boundaries.
Where to Go Next
Starting from an Existing Experiment Description — turn a written protocol or report into a configured draft.
Meet Your SDLabs AI Assistant — what the assistant can and can't do across your workflow.