Quickstart
By the end of this page you will have a link you can send to a customer. They will open it, ask your datasheet a question, and get an answer with page citations — without signing in, installing anything, or talking to you.
You need a Practicl account and a PDF. A datasheet or user manual works best; pick one you know well, because the fastest way to judge the answers is to ask something you can already check.
1 · Create a product
Open Products in the left-hand navigation. At the top of the page there is a single field, Product name, and a Create product button.
Name it after the thing you sell, as your customers say it — the field suggests HV-01 Compressor. The new product appears in the table below, ready for a document.
One product for now. If you are wondering how finely to divide them later, the rule is in How Practicl is organised: two documents that would never go to the same customer belong to different products.
2 · Upload your datasheet
Go to Documents. The New document card takes three things: a Title, the Product you just made, and the PDF file. Press Upload.
The title is what your customer sees above the conversation, so write it the way they would recognise it rather than the way the file was named.
The upload itself takes seconds. The document then appears in the list marked Processing.
3 · While it reads
Practicl is working through the PDF — pulling out the text, including text inside tables and figures, splitting it into passages that each stand on their own, and indexing every passage so a question can find it.
Processing takes about fifteen minutes for a fifty-page document. Everyone with an admin role in your organisation is emailed when it is ready, so there is nothing to watch. The status in the list becomes Completed.
Some documents arrive as Needs review instead. That is Practicl saying it found less usable text than it expected — usually a scan without an OCR layer. Open it and ask it something; if the answers are good, approve it.
4 · Send it to a customer
This is the part worth getting to. Select your document in the list. In the panel that opens on the right, press Share.
A link is now on your clipboard. It looks like this:
https://app.practicl.io/chat/{manualId}?key=pk_live_...That one press did three things: it created a new key, scoped it to this document and nothing else, and built the URL around it. There is nothing further to configure.
Paste it into an email and send it to someone — a customer, a distributor, or yourself in a private browser window, which is the honest way to see what they will see.
What they get
The page opens with your datasheet on one side and a conversation on the other. They type a question. The answer arrives a few words at a time, and under it are the pages it came from — clicking one moves the PDF to that page, so they can read the paragraph the answer was drawn from.
They never sign in, never create an account, and never see your dashboard. Ask it something specific from deep in the document, the kind of question that normally arrives as an email to your applications engineer.
When the document does not cover a question, it says so rather than guessing. For a datasheet, that is the behaviour you want — a confident wrong answer about a tolerance is worse than no answer.
You are done
That is the whole product: a document, a link, and a customer answering their own question at two in the morning in a timezone where nobody is awake.
Two other ways to put the same thing in front of them:
- Embed the widget — one script tag puts a chat bubble on your own site, answering from your website’s pages rather than your uploaded documents, so a visitor never leaves it.
- Call the API — ask questions from your own code and build your own interface around the answers.