NOTE: AlphaSense Assistant is currently available through our limited private beta. If you have any questions or would like to inquire further, please reach out to your Account Manager.

Assistant’s conversational search functionality provides answers to your questions, summarizing insights from AlphaSense's extensive library of premium content. Ask Assistant in real time with natural language in a conversational experience, and Assistant will formulate an answer that utilizes all key market perspectives that make AlphaSense's content library so valuable.

Assistant Interactions

Assistant is purpose-built to help you get up to speed on topics quickly, by answering questions like:

Type	Example
Company Information	What is Caterpillar's AI Strategy?
Segment Information	How did Apple's wearables segment perform last quarter?
Industry Information	How has shrink impacted the Dollar Store industry since Covid?
Product Information	What is the commercial potential for oral GLP1?
Company Metrics	How have T-Mobile subscribers been trending over the last few years?
Macroeconomic Impact	What impact would an EU oil embargo have on crude flows?
Comparisons	Compare Apple and Google's approach to Gen AI

From any query asked, Assistant will leverage natural language to extract relevant parameters from your question in order to run the most effective search. The parameters that can be extracted are:

Keywords and/or Topics
Companies
Industries
Regions
Timeframes
Source Documents and/or Voices
- Broker Research
- Company Docs
- Expert Insights
- News
- Regulatory
- Patents
- Internal Content

As with all of AlphaSense's generative AI products, Assistant will cite its sources. AlphaSense will not only cite the snippets that Assistant referenced while constructing a response, but we also conduct a subsequent evaluation to confirm that each cited snippet contains supporting information.

Assistant will also tell you when it doesn't have an answer. Rather than hallucinate an answer, Assistant will let you know when it cannot find any relevant content within your AlphaSense library to generate an answer to your question.

If you want to discover how to access Assistant, take a look at our "Accessing Assistant" article.

Structure of an Assistant Response

After asking a question to Assistant, you'll see the question you asked (and its corresponding plan), the content summarized by Assistant with citations, a conclusion/summary, and related questions.

Question asked and corresponding plan

At the top of Assistant's response, you'll find the exact question you asked along with the ability to view the plan created.

AlphaSense Planning Agent

In order to provide complete and concise answers to very complex questions, AlphaSense utilizes a "Planning Agent" to break down these complex queries into multiple questions. These multiple questions are then used to retrieve the correct information before Assistant analyzes the information to create a single, concise response.

Selecting "View Plan" allows you to see what questions the Assistant Planning Agent broke the original query into.

Response & Citations

Assistant will research and structure its response to your question, providing an organized overview of the major takeaways.

Each summary will provide a direct citation to the source material it was summarized from. Simply select a summary and the Keyword Hits pane and document preview will open alongside a condensed Assistant view. This allows you to conduct further exploratory research, while also retaining the ability to ask follow up questions to Assistant.

Depending on the response, Assistant may compile a Conclusion/Summary related to your question.

Regenerating & Sharing

At the end of the Assistant response, you'll have the ability to generate a new response, share the Assistant Summary, and dictate if the response was Helpful or Unhelpful.

Generating New Response

You can generate a new response if you'd like Assistant to create a new answer to your original question. You'll likely generate a new response if:

You want more summaries to reference/look at
Assistant didn't adequately answer your question and no rewording/rephrasing is needed on the original question.

Share Responses via Clipboard or Notebook

Easily share Assistant responses wherever you need them! Select "Share" and either copy to your clipboard (and paste them in a document, presentation, etc) or directly add them to any Note within AlphaSense.

Best Practices when Interacting with Assistant

Asking Questions

Best practices if Assistant didn't answer your question

Generate a new answer - at the bottom of the response, you can have Assistant answer your same question without adjusting your original question
Adjust your question:
- If Assistant provided an answer but it was focused on the wrong content sets, we'd recommend starting a new Assistant session OR using Assistant from the traditional AlphaSense search and setting your filters manually
  - This will ensure you're searching against all content available to you in your AlphaSense account
  - If you're wanting to hone in on a specific content set, include that content set/market perspective in your question to Assistant (ex: "What does broker research say...", "...within PubMed articles?", "How do former competitors think about..."
- If Assistant provided an answer but it was focused on the wrong companies or keywords, we'd recommend altering your question and being more specific.
  - It's best to include tickers and use words that speak directly to a given topic (ex: searching "electric vehicle industry" is more optimal compared to "electric vehicle space").
  - It's also ideal to use keywords that activate Smart Synonyms whenever possible to optimize results

Adjusting Timeframe

By default, Assistant will search the last 12 months. If you'd like to change the timeframe Assistant will search against, use natural language in your question, such as "...in the last 3 years", "In Q2 of this year...", and "...last month..."

Setting Assistant's Content

Finding Specific Content

Content in AlphaSense can be referred to in a variety of ways. The below dictionary provides a few examples for each

Content Type	Example Language
Company Documents	"What is <Company> guidance..." "...as per 10K" "How does the <Company> plan..."
Broker Research	"How do brokers view..." "What are analysts saying..." "What does <Broker> say about..."
Expert Insights	"What's the expert position on..." "What are industry experts saying..." "What do former competitors believe..."
News & Regulatory	"What are news agencies saying..." "List the latest news on..." "...within PubMed articles"
Internal Content**	"Do we have any internal data about..." "What is our internal perspective on..." "What are our views on..."

** If you're an Enterprise Intelligence user of AlphaSense, you'll also be able to leverage Assistant across your integrated, internal content in addition to the content existing in AlphaSense

Content Defaults in Assistant

As mentioned, there are 3 different avenues available for you to access and launch Assistant:

Directly launch Assistant from the left hand navigation panel
Launch Assistant from how you normally search in AlphaSense
Dive into Assistant after you've run a search

When you begin your search with Assistant [Option 1], it accesses your default sources with no content filters applied. This allows you to search wide and use natural language to filter for various sources and content.

If you launched Assistant using Options 2 or 3 above, Assistant will carry over any content filters applied to those searches into your chat. If you need to clear any filters, either start a new session with Assistant or return to the traditional search and clearing your search.

Example: A search is run for "R&D strategy" and "PFE", as well as a content filter for Expert Insights is applied
- If you open Assistant from this search, the summaries will only be generated from Expert Insights content.

Follow Up Questions

Conversational Memory: Assistant does maintain conversational memory. If you ask "What are the positives around Nividia's supply chain?", you're follow up question can speak indirectly to the first question. Example "What about the negatives?"
Content context is not carried over. If you're wanting to isolate a specific content set in a follow up question, you'll need to specific it.
- Example: When asking a follow up question to "How are brokers speaking positively about Rivian's R&D?, instead of asking "What about the negatives", ask "What about the negatives from brokers?"

FAQ

How does Assistant work?

Assistant uses a number of natural-language process and machine learning techniques to interpret questions, retrieving all relevant information, and reason over the data to analyze/summarize findings.

It starts by interpreting what you're asking - extracting relevant parameters from your question to run the most effective query.

Then, Assistant retrieves the top 200 snippets for that query from documents across AlphaSense relevant to your search. These snippets are then used by our large language model to generate an answer.

What content in AlphaSense can Assistant use to reason over?

Assistant can source it's answers from all content that's available to you in your AlphaSense account.

How does Assistant tackle complex questions?

With the Planning Agent, Assistant can break down questions into multiple queries to retrieve the right information before then analyzing those queries to produce a single, concise answer.

Assistant didn't answer my question - what should I do?

If Assistant didn't answer your question, you have a few options

Generate a new answer - at the bottom of the response, you can have Assistant answer your same question without adjusting your original question
Adjust your question:
- If Assistant provided an answer but it was focused on the wrong content sets, we'd recommend starting a new Assistant session OR using Assistant from the traditional AlphaSense search and setting your filters manually. This will ensure you're searching against all content available to you in your AlphaSense account
- If Assistant provided an answer but it was focused on the wrong companies or keywords, we'd recommend altering your question and being more specific (include tickers, remove keywords that might have drastically different meanings (ex: "space" can refer to industries or aeronautics)

What questions do Assistant not answer well?

Screening - while Assistant will attempt to answer questions like "What companies are working on Generative AI?", it doesn't yet provide a comprehensive list. We recommend using the traditional AlphaSense search experience (via 'Company in Search Results' module) until this skill is added to Assistant
Calculations - while Assistant will answer questions like "What is Apple’s revenue growth trend over the last 5 years?" by looking for explicit discussion on the topic, it does not yet perform mathematical calculations or provide charts in its answer.
Librarian - Questions like ‘Summarize Meta’s last 3 earnings calls’ do not presently work well because Assistant doesn’t have the ability to source an exact set of documents. Instead, ask something like ‘What are key positive and negative trends from across Meta’s earnings calls’

Assistant didn't produce an answer to my question - what does that mean?

Assistant will tell you when it doesn't have an answer: Rather than hallucinate an answer, Assistant will let you know when it cannot find any relevant content to generate an answer. If your question is not producing Assistant responses, you might try reformatting your question.

It could be that there is no/not enough content around the topic you're searching for, which you can verify through the classic AlphaSense search experience.