Knowledge base
The knowledge base is where you bring your own material into MINDTRICKS: PDFs, crawled websites, YouTube videos, and Canvas notes. Once a source is indexed, you can read it, chat against it, and turn sections into study tools.
How it fits together
PDF, web crawl, and YouTube collections are ingested, chunked, and stored so indexing, retrieval, and Mind Chat can search them. Canvas is a writable workspace of structured notes rather than a crawled file. Ingestion runs as a background task—follow progress in Tasks. Sign-in and account credits are required.
Upload a PDF in PDF Explorer. The file is processed into a searchable collection with a document viewer, section outline, and optional concept graph. You can chat or use voice against the open document, generate a quiz from a section, and attach the collection as a Mind Chat source with page-range or section scoping.
Web crawl
Start a crawl from Web Crawl with a URL, depth (1–3), page limit, and whether to follow external links. The result is a hierarchical outline of the site with markdown per section, in-collection search, and reader chat. Crawled collections appear in Mind Chat as web crawl sources you can scope to section roots.
YouTube
Paste a YouTube URL in YouTube. The video is registered as a collection with an embedded player, chapter/caption sections, an AI summary when available, and chat scoped to that video. Transcript availability depends on the source; processing cost scales with length (the UI estimates videos up to about 30 minutes). YouTube collections can be selected in Mind Chat with chapter scoping.
Canvas
Canvas is a knowledge collection you write rather than ingest. Create an empty outline, or ask the system to build a learning plan from a topic. Each section holds a markdown document with autosave, preview, and revision history. You can generate a quiz from a section. Canvas KB is not a vector source in the Mind Chat picker today—use it as structured notes, then generate TRICKS from those notes when you want quizzes or study decks.
A separate Canvas tool inside Mind Chat can create thread-linked documents as a follow-up to chat. That flow is described on the agentic overview and under TRICKS.
Using sources in chat
In Mind Chat, attach PDF, web crawl, and YouTube collections when you want answers grounded in your material. The assistant can plan to search the knowledge base, retrieve relevant chunks, and cite them in the reply. From explorer pages you can also spawn quizzes, flashcards, or other media from a selected section without leaving the document.