Personal retrieval
- Industry term
Personal retrieval is an assistant searching the records you allow it to read, such as email, notes, files, and calendar, for what answers your question, usually showing which record each part came from.
The assistant writes searches from your question and runs them on the sources you've connected, using its own catalog of your records or each app's built-in search, then answers from the top matches. Search ranks records by how close they are to your words, so an old record can outrank the one that applies now.
Where you’ll meet it
You ask your assistant whether your gym membership can be canceled with a week's notice. It says yes and links a welcome email from three years ago. You remember the gym sending new terms last spring.
What to do
Ask the assistant to find the gym's current terms and quote the cancellation clause along with the document's date. If it finds nothing newer than the welcome email, check the terms on the gym's website or your account page yourself before you give notice.
Easy to mix up
| Personal retrieval | RAG |
|---|---|
| You, account by account, in the assistant's settings | A builder, who picks the documents an app searches before it answers |
Check yourself
Your assistant is connected to your email and your notes. You ask, “Did I ever reply to the landlord about the leak?” It says you didn't, after searching every email you've sent. How firm is that “no”?
Go deeperPersonal records are harder to search well, and citations need checking
Personal retrieval applies retrieval-augmented generation, described by Lewis and colleagues in 2020, to one person's records. Those records bring their own trouble for search. Two people share a first name, dates are written a dozen ways, and the deciding detail often sits in an attachment or a screenshot whose text the search may never index.
A link shows that a record exists; whether it supports the sentence beside it takes reading. In a 2023 study of AI search engines, Liu and colleagues found that only about half of the generated sentences were fully supported by the sources they cited.