Mediastilo

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Ask

Ask is Mediastilo as a conversation. Instead of going to the right page and building the right filter, you ask, and it goes and looks.

Find it in the left-hand navigation, above Ideas.

What it can answer

Your own material. What you have collected, what you have written, how your sources are doing, and what your brand profile says. This is the part a general chatbot cannot do: it can search the web, but it cannot search your corpus.

  • "How are we doing this month?"
  • "Have we covered anything about housing?"
  • "Which of our sources are broken?"
  • "What have we written recently?"

The open web. It can search the live web and shows you the pages it used, so you can check anything it tells you.

  • "What are people saying about us online?"
  • "Has anything changed with the grant deadline?"

What your integrations measure. If you have connected Google Search Console, it can read what Google actually shows you for. If you have connected a CMS, it can read what that site says is published. Both are read-only, and both appear only once the connection exists — it will never guess at numbers it cannot see.

  • "What are people typing to find us?"
  • "How did last week's piece do?"
  • "What have we actually published this month?"

A page you link. Paste an address and ask what it says. It will open a page you have named, or one that came back from a search in the same conversation. It will not open an address it worked out for itself.

An address stays open to it for the whole conversation, so you can paste a link once and refer back to it ten messages later without pasting it again.

The file behind the link. A page that is nine attachments and no prose is a common shape for an official notice, and the story is inside the attachments. It can open a PDF or a Word document — including the older .doc format — and read what is in it.

A picture on the page. Some figures are never written down: they are a screenshot of a table. It can look at the pictures on a page it was given and read them, and it tells you that is where the number came from. If it cannot read them it says so rather than describing what they might show.

Answers show their work

Above each answer you will see a line for every lookup it made — which tool, what it searched for, and how many results came back. Under the answer you may see a table, a chart, a timeline, or a list of sources.

That is the point of the design: you can always see where a number came from. If a lookup found nothing, the answer says so. It will not fill the gap with a plausible figure.

It will not invent one either. If nothing in your collected material answers your question, it tells you that rather than answering from general knowledge. That is deliberate, and it is why the numbers it gives you can be trusted.

Turning a conversation into a draft

Ask what is worth writing — or just talk through a subject — and it can put a suggested piece on screen: a headline, the angle it would take, why it is worth writing now, and any of your own articles it would be written from.

Nothing is created until you say so. Click Create this draft and Mediastilo makes the draft, starts writing it, and opens it in the editor. The draft arrives carrying the brief and the conversation it came out of, so the writing assistant already knows why the piece exists.

Because writing starts on that click, it spends a draft credit — the same one generating from anywhere else spends. You have read the headline, the angle, why it is worth writing and which of your articles it will use, so the click is the decision; there is no second confirmation on the next screen.

If you accept the same suggestion twice, the button becomes Open the draft — it will not make a second copy.

Drafts made this way appear in Drafts like any other, filed under the origin From a chat, so you can filter for everything that came out of a conversation.

Changes it can suggest

It can also offer a change to your setup, as a card with one button:

  • Add a source — you mention a site worth collecting from, and it offers to add it. It checks first that you are not already collecting it.
  • Track a topic — a subject you want watched, so it can feed Ideas.
  • The language drafts are written in — English or Croatian.
  • Ban a word — a word generated text should never use.
  • Connect an integration — Search Console or your CMS, when the answer you asked for needs data it has no connection to. This is the one card without a button that does the work: a connection is made under your own Google or CMS account, so the card takes you to Integrations instead. It is never offered for something you have already connected.

The card carries its own argument for the change, and nothing happens until you press the button. Pressing it makes the change as you, exactly as if you had gone to that page and made it — including the limits of your plan, so adding a source counts against your source allowance.

A card you have used says Applied from then on, including after a reload, and cannot be pressed a second time.

Conversations are kept

Every conversation is saved and listed down the left, newest first, grouped by when you last used it. Each one is named automatically from what you first asked.

Click New chat to start a fresh one. Each conversation has its own address, so you can bookmark one or send it to a colleague on your team.

Long conversations load the most recent messages first. Scroll up and the earlier ones load as you reach them.

What it cannot do

It cannot change anything. It has no way to edit a source, alter a setting, publish a draft, or delete anything. Every action goes through a card you click, and that click runs as you, through the same controls you would have used yourself.

It cannot see another brand. Everything it looks at is scoped to the brand you are working in. If you run several brands, switch brands to ask about a different one.

Costs

Asking a question costs nothing on its own. Searching the live web is metered — each search draws on your plan's monthly search allowance, the same allowance the draft grounding feature uses. If that allowance runs out, Ask will tell you plainly rather than guessing at what a search would have found.

Creating a draft from a suggestion costs a draft credit, because it starts writing straight away.

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