Ask your first question: a five-minute walkthrough

Lanternfish answers questions from the places your team already writes things down. You do not need a query language or a special prompt. Ask the way you would ask a colleague, and Lanternfish reads the sources you have connected to find the answer. This guide takes about five minutes and ends with a cited answer on your screen.

Before you start

You need at least one connected source. If you have just signed up, the setup checklist on the home screen walks you through connecting Slack, Google Drive or any other connector. Our guide on connecting Slack, Notion and Google Drive covers that step in detail.

Questions only draw on sources you can already open yourself, so a freshly connected workspace may need a few minutes to fill in. If the first sync is still running, the Ask screen shows a progress bar and you can come back in a moment.

Ask, then read the receipts

1. Open Lanternfish and select Ask in the left sidebar.

2. Type a full question, such as "Why did churn rise in the EU in Q3?" Names, dates and project codes all help.

3. Press Enter. The answer arrives within a few seconds, with a numbered receipt after each sentence.

4. Select any receipt to open the document, ticket or thread it came from.

5. Keep typing to follow up in the same thread, or choose Try another question to start fresh.

A good question is specific about what you want to know and loose about where it lives. You do not have to say which channel or folder to look in. Lanternfish finds that part.

Every sentence in an answer ends with one or more numbered receipts. A receipt links to the exact passage the sentence was built from. Hover over it to see the source name, who last edited it and when. Select it to open the original in a side panel with the matching passage highlighted.

Checking an answer takes four steps:

1. Read the answer once, then select the first receipt.

2. Compare the highlighted passage with the sentence. The numbers and names should match.

3. Look at the source date in the preview. Older sources carry a small clock.

4. If a sentence looks wrong, choose Report on it and pick what is off. Reports go to your workspace admins.

Sentences without a receipt are marked as inferences. Lanternfish adds them only to connect two sourced facts, so treat them as suggestions rather than answers.

When an answer comes back thin

If an answer is short or says it could not find a source, add a time range or a team name and ask again. Lanternfish says so when it cannot find a source instead of guessing, so an empty answer usually means a connector is missing, not that the question was wrong.

Two quick checks help. Open Settings, then Connectors, and confirm the tool you expect is connected and has finished syncing. Then ask yourself whether the answer was ever written down. A decision made on a call and never recorded will not show up, and no amount of rewording will change that.

Once you have a first answer you trust, try a harder one: a question that spans a document and a thread, or one about something that changed last week. That is where receipts start to earn their keep.