Ask

Ask is the conversational surface for questions about what is happening on the floor — for example, why a line’s output dropped yesterday afternoon, or what changed on a cell since a given shift.

Evidence, not assertion

Every claim Ask makes links back to the specific thing that supports it: a window of a time series, a detector event, a document page, or an image crop. A claim without one of these is removed before it reaches the screen. This exists so an operator never has to just trust a generated answer — they can click through to the exact data behind it.

What Ask can and cannot see

Ask can read the same historian data, events and documents the rest of the app can see for your site, through the same gateway-mediated path described in Architecture & isolation — it has no direct database access and no ability to reach outside the site’s own data. It cannot change a machine’s behavior: it is a read-and-explain surface, not a control path, and it never talks to OT devices.

Relationship to detectors

Ask does not detect anything itself. The states, counts and alarms it explains are produced by the deterministic detectors and the vision worker described in Detectors and Vision; Ask’s job is to retrieve, correlate and explain what those have already found.