Direct answer: A Repository in Edithly is a collection of documents that you can query, chat with, and generate visuals from — all at once. It's your AI-powered knowledge base for any subject, project, or team.
Beyond the Single Document
Most AI document tools are designed for one document at a time. You upload a PDF, you ask questions, you close the session. The knowledge disappears.
Real knowledge work doesn't work this way. Legal teams work with dozens of contracts. Researchers work with hundreds of papers. Sales teams maintain libraries of product docs, competitive intelligence, and proposal templates. Students accumulate a semester's worth of notes, lecture slides, and readings.
Edithly's Repository is designed for this reality: persistent, multi-document, searchable knowledge bases.
How Repositories Work
Create a Repository
Name your repository — "Q3 Client Project", "Organic Chemistry", "Investment Research", "Company Policies".
Add Documents
Upload any combination of:
- PDF files (research papers, reports, contracts, textbooks)
- Word documents (proposals, notes, templates)
- URLs (web pages, articles)
- YouTube videos (lectures, tutorials, presentations)
- Plain text files
Documents are ingested and indexed. Edithly reads and understands them all.
Ask Questions Across the Collection
Type any question. Edithly searches across every document in the repository and returns:
- The answer
- Which document it came from
- The specific section or passage
Generate Visuals from the Collection
Generate a mind map, summary, or comparison visual from the entire repository — not just one document. Identify patterns, contradictions, and connections across your full body of source material.
Use Cases
Academic Research
A PhD student researching renewable energy policy uploads 40 relevant papers into a repository. Instead of reading each paper individually, they ask: "Which papers discuss feed-in tariff mechanisms?" or "What are the most cited barriers to solar adoption across these studies?" Edithly retrieves, cites, and summarises across all 40 papers.
Legal Review
A legal team working on a complex M&A transaction uploads all relevant agreements, representations, and warranties into a single repository. Questions like "Which contract contains the material adverse change clause?" or "What are the IP ownership provisions across all agreements?" return referenced answers in seconds.
Sales Intelligence
A sales team creates a repository containing: competitor product pages, analyst reports, customer case studies, and their own product documentation. Before any client meeting, a rep asks: "How does our solution compare to Competitor X for enterprise use cases?" Edithly synthesises the answer from across the collection.
Student Subject Management
A university student creates one repository per subject. Each repository contains: lecture slides, prescribed readings, past papers, and tutorial worksheets. At exam time, ask any question — "explain the difference between X and Y from the course material" — and get an answer drawn from all uploaded content.
Team Onboarding
Upload company policies, process documents, org charts, and product guides into a shared repository. New team members access it via shared link and ask questions rather than spending days reading static documentation.
Repository vs Standard Chat
| Feature | Standard Chat | Repository |
|---|---|---|
| Document scope | 1–3 documents | Unlimited |
| Persistence | Session-based | Persistent across sessions |
| Multi-doc search | No | Yes, with citation |
| Team sharing | Via link | Via link (shared access) |
| Best for | One-off questions | Ongoing projects and research |
Building a Living Knowledge Base
A repository grows with your project. Add documents as you encounter them. Ask questions at any stage. Generate visuals when you need to present or review. The knowledge base becomes smarter as you add more sources — because more context means more accurate, nuanced answers.
This is the difference between a document archive and a knowledge base. A repository in Edithly is the latter.
Start Building Your Knowledge Base
Create your first repository — upload any documents and start asking questions across them. Free to start.
