Knowledge Base

Overview

The in-app AI chat assistant is a slide-out sidebar available throughout the Truestamp web app. You open it from the sparkles button in the navigation and close it with Escape, and you ask questions in plain language: how Truestamp works, what a proof proves, how to verify one, or (when you are signed in) about your own items and their status. It is a read-only assistant. It can look things up and explain them, but it never creates, changes, deletes, or submits anything on your behalf. The panel is a persistent chat: your conversation history is saved, so it survives navigation, page reloads, and signing in from a different device.

The assistant is scoped to what you are allowed to see. Every lookup it runs happens under your identity, so a signed-in user only ever sees their own teams’ data, and an anonymous visitor can only reach public information. The assistant can also answer questions about the Truestamp MCP server and the wider product, drawing on the same knowledge base that backs this documentation.

What you can ask it

The assistant is built around a fixed, read-only set of capabilities. It can:

• Explain how Truestamp works and what it does (and does not) prove.
• Search and list your items, look up a single item by id, and report an item’s lifecycle status (created, processing, committed).
• Generate a cryptographic proof for a committed subject and verify a proof, returning the authoritative verification result. These are pure computations that read and check data without changing anything.
• Run pure utility computes: hash UTF-8 text, verify that text hashes to an expected value, extract the embedded timestamp from a UUIDv7 or a ULID, canonicalize a JSON object (RFC 8785 / JCS), read the server’s current clock time (a clock reading only, never evidence of when anything was submitted), and identify what a bare id refers to.
• Read public entropy beacons and finalized Truestamp blocks.
• Look back over your own saved conversations and the messages in them.
• Search the Truestamp knowledge base, read a concept, and follow the links between related concepts to answer “how does X work” questions.

Because the toolset is a read-only allowlist, the assistant cannot create, update, delete, redact, or submit items, and it cannot run arbitrary code. Every question you ask that touches your data is answered by looking it up as you, under the normal access rules, so it can never surface another user’s or another team’s data.

The assistant is also kept on topic. It is designed to answer questions about Truestamp, the cryptography and timestamping field it belongs to, and your Truestamp data, and it will decline general-purpose requests (coding help, weather, trivia, and the like) regardless of how they are framed. It will also point you at the Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, Cookie Policy, and Data Processing Addendum rather than restating them, because the published English text of those documents governs and a paraphrase of a clause is not the document.

Signed-in users and anonymous guests

The sidebar works both for signed-in users and, when enabled, for anonymous visitors who are not logged in.

• Signed-in users get the full read-only toolset above, scoped to their own account and teams. They can ask about their items, generate and verify proofs, and get answers grounded in their data.
• Anonymous guests get an advisor-flavored experience with a deliberately smaller toolset: the knowledge base, the utility computes, and public reads (entropy beacons and finalized blocks) only. A guest has no item, proof, conversation, or identity tool, and cannot ask what a bare id refers to, so an anonymous visitor can never reach any account or team data. Guest chat is a single ongoing conversation tied to your browser session, so one visitor never sees another’s chat.

Anonymous chat is also subject to tighter usage limits than signed-in chat, because anonymous access is a heavier cost and abuse surface. A guest gets a small fixed daily message allowance, with further caps per network address and across all anonymous visitors at once. In both cases each message is length-limited and the assistant enforces burst and daily limits, so the exact caps are managed by the product rather than something you configure.

Starting a chat about a specific item

From one of your own item pages you can start a chat about that item with one click. The launcher seeds the conversation with a question about that specific item (“its current status and what has been proven about it”), so you land directly in a focused conversation instead of retyping the item id.

The same launcher appears at other entry points. The home page opens the panel with a short introduction in the assistant’s voice and offers example questions you can send with one click, and the knowledge base offers to hand the concept you are reading, or a topic you are still looking for, to the assistant. Those public launchers work for anonymous visitors as well as signed-in users, while the item launcher sits on a signed-in page. In every case the assistant answers within whatever you are allowed to see.

History and persistence

Your chat history is saved, so the assistant is a durable place to come back to rather than a throwaway box:

• Moving between pages within the app keeps the open panel, its messages, and any reply that is still streaming, with no interruption.
• Reloading the page, or signing in from a new device, reloads your most recent conversation from saved history.
• A reply that is still being written continues even if your connection drops, and is picked up again when you reconnect.

The panel itself always starts closed on a fresh page load; it does not silently reopen from a previous visit. From the history view you can rename or delete a past conversation, or start a new one. Anonymous guests have a single ongoing conversation instead, so the history view and the new-chat control are not offered to them.

Availability

The assistant is gated by feature flags, so it can be turned on or off without a code change. A master switch controls the chat sidebar for everyone, and a separate switch controls anonymous (logged-out) chat specifically. Turning off the master switch removes the sidebar entirely; turning off the anonymous switch removes it for logged-out visitors while keeping it for signed-in users. Both are enabled by default. If you do not see the sparkles button, chat may be turned off for your context.

Limitations

• The assistant is read-only. It answers questions and runs verifications, but it never creates, changes, deletes, or submits anything. To act on your data, use the normal app, API, or MCP surfaces.
• It only sees what you may see. A signed-in user’s answers are scoped to their own teams, and an anonymous guest is limited to public information.
• It answers Truestamp questions only and declines off-topic, general-purpose requests.
• Each message is capped at 4,000 characters, and a conversation takes one question at a time: while a reply is still being written, that conversation will not accept another message.
• Usage is limited by a short-term burst limit and by a daily message allowance that depends on your plan and resets at UTC midnight, and the assistant can also decline when overall demand across the service is high. Anonymous guests get smaller allowances than signed-in users.
• Anonymous conversations are tied to your browser session, are not carried onto your account if you later sign in, and are removed after a long stretch of inactivity (90 days by default).

Citations

1. RFC 8785: JSON Canonicalization Scheme (JCS). Backs the JSON canonicalization the assistant can run for you.