Working With Files – Sapience

Sapience Files

💡

Sapience sports a full-fledged cloud storage system within it akin to Google Drive, Dropbox or Box. Its AI-native, with features like full-text extractino & search (even for videos!), file translation, chat-with-file (mini-RAG) and file summarization right out of the box.

In addition to storing files, and being able to share them with other users, or collaborate on them in a Project, Sapience has many AI-first features that come from building a file storage app from the ground-up with AI in mind.

Auto-summarization: Sapience will read & summarize every file that you upload, and that AI summary is available in the file manager as you mouse over your files.

Text extraction: Sapience automatically extracts the text & data from more than 1000 file types, including audio and video. Try uploading a voice recording you’ve created!

Translation: because we have the raw text, we can easily translate it into whatever language you like.

File System Overview

1. Files Manager

When you click on All Files in the Sidebar, or from the Dashboard, you are taken to the File Manager within Sapience Files.

Some things to note about the File Manager:

Descriptions: as you mouse-over each file, you will get a short description of the file. This is based on the text that has been extracted by Sapience’s document parser, and also works on video/audio.

Scope: Files can belong to a user, an org or be global in scope. All of your files (that you upload) are user-scoped and only you can see them (unless you share them explicitly). Org-scoped files belong to your organization and were made available by your Sapience Org Admin.

Source: files either come from humans (source = “user”) or from an Agent (source = “ai”).

Owner: for your files, this is you. For org-scoped files it will usually be your Sapience Org Admin. For files that are shared with you by another user, this will be that user’s username.

2. Smart Folders

In the Sidebar, under the heading “File System” you will find a series of Smart Folders. These are pre-created filters that help you quickly find files that fall into certain “buckets”. Here is a list and explanation of these:

All Files: an unfiltered view of all your files (and folders if you have created some, see below).

My Uploads: files that you have uploaded. Different to all files.

Outputs: all files you have access to that were created by an AI.

Exports: if you export a Note, or a Conversation to a Word Doc or PDF, these are also shown here to make it easy to find again.

Organization Files: Files that your Sapience Org Admin has published to all Org users.

Voice Notes: very useful filter that will show you all the voice notes you’ve created in the various parts of Sapience that support Voice.

Visualizations: Agents that support Visual mode will create static and interactive visuals. All of these are gathered here.

3. Personal Folders

Like any file system manager, you can create your own folders to organize your files. This is hidden by default, until you create your first folder. The way to do this is to click the “Actions” button on the File Manager, and select “Create Folder”.

4. File Info Card

The File Info Card is what shows up whenever you click on a file in Sapience (unless it can be previewed, like an image or HTML file, which will auto-preview). The File Info card lets you quickly see core meta-data about a File, perform common actions, as well as more advanced options in the More menu.

*The File Info Card with the More Menu expanded to show additional actions availab.e*

5. Actions: Sharing Files

Clicking the Share action on a File will give you the option to share the file with another member of your Org. This will then show in Menu > Manage Shares > Shared by Me. A quick note on permissions: there is no “write” permission level for file shares by design. A file in Sapience is static, and subsequent versions of a file are considered new files (but versioning is supported by unique path). So, read-only share is what you want if you want others to access your files.

Note on projects: if you have added Files to a Sapience Project, and then add another person to that Project as a Member, they will auto-magically get shares for the files inside that project and you don’t need to do it separately.

6. Actions: Translation

Because Sapience extracts the raw text content of files, including video and audio, you can then “work” with it, including translating it into another language!

Expand me for walkthrough:

On the File Info card, click the more menu:

You probably first want to click get raw text to verify that there is a good “copy” of the file’s contents. If problems, hit re-process content, otherwise select translate. You’ll see this window:

Then, depending on the length of the content, after a minute or two, you’ll get the file translated into your desired language!

7. Actions: Chat With File Agent

One of the built-in Agents in Sapience is the File Chat Agent. What this does behind the scenes is uses a long-context model (e.g. GPT-4.1 from Open AI which supports 1 million tokens in its context window) and loads the entire contents of the file into the Agent conversation. This is technically CAG not RAG… but the point is that you get an Agent created on-the-fly that knows all about that File. Great for long / complex documents.