Personal retrieval

Searching a person's permitted records for material relevant to a question, task, or decision, often with provenance in the result.

Personal retrieval may search email, notes, files, calendars, or structured records through one index or several connectors. It can return source records directly or supply them to a model for synthesis. Citations are useful for factual claims, but the system must also respect record permissions, dates, identity resolution, and the difference between a relevant source and an authoritative one.

Builder example

Traceability should follow consequence and task type. A policy answer needs the governing current record and supporting passage; a list of possible writing themes may only need representative source links. Citation coverage does not repair missing retrieval or unsupported synthesis.

Common confusion: Personal retrieval runs over the records you own, while Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is the broader technique of searching any document set at question time and feeding the matches to the model. Personal retrieval is RAG aimed at your own meetings, emails, and notes, with verifiable sources as the point rather than an optional extra.