askr Skills

askr Skills are ten chats behind the Ask tile, each built for one job. The model writes plain words and small pieces of structured data; your device draws them as cards, calculators, steps and sources, checks them, and does the maths. Every skill runs on any model on askr, and each one opens on the model that suits it.

The chooser

Tap Ask and a popup opens: Ask anything, the plain chat, full width, then the ten skills two to a row, a sheet on a phone. Pick one and the chat opens on the skill's model, with its own message box hint, its own settings over the message box, and one line under the bar on what happens in it. A plain chat that asks about a loan, a symptom, a translation or a fix offers a chip to ask it in that skill, with the question ready to send: decided on your device from your words, no model call, easy to dismiss.

The ten

Look things up, Summarise and Shop and compare search on every turn where the model can; Fix it, Health and Money search in Performance, since current facts matter there. Health and Money carry a rule you always see: information, not medical advice; education, not financial advice. In an emergency Health shows the care card on your device before the reply and tells the model to agree with it.

The screen

Beside the chat on a desktop, a sheet on a phone, each skill draws what it made. Look things up shows every page it read as a card with the exact words that back each sentence. Write and edit keeps the draft beside the chat with the changes marked, a word count and reading age worked out on your device, and one-tap rewrites. Learn and homework reveals a worked solution one step at a time with a hint on each, checks your arithmetic on the device, and marks a quiz there too. Fix it shows a Fix card: what you need before you start, the difficulty, the steps easiest first, a did-this-fix-it check under the current step, and any risky step locked until you have read its warning. Health draws each result on a bar against the range printed on your report, builds your appointment list to tick off on the day, and shows a care card that says when to get help. Translate gives a two-part card with tappable words and other choices, a clarifying question when the meaning could go two ways, and photo translation for menus and signs. Money runs loan, mortgage, savings, debt and budget calculators on your device with the maths shown, and reads a statement photo into spending by category. Brainstorm deals ideas as cards to keep, drop, combine and build on, with a lens to filter them. Summarise gives an overview card with the quote behind each point. Shop and compare asks what matters first, then puts the options side by side with the better one marked on every row.

The panel opens the moment you send, in the skill's real shape and empty: the headings, the rows, the controls, one line on what is coming, and your own words. Nothing is invented. Ask about a mortgage with the numbers in your question and the calculator opens with them already in, free, while the model is still thinking. On a phone a slim bar appears at send, pulses while askr works, and opens the sheet.

Settings pills

Each skill's own settings sit over the message box as pills, then quick replies: your device and its system in Fix it, the languages and the tone in Translate, the level and whether askr guides or explains in Learn, your country and currency in Money, what matters to you in Shop and compare, the length and format in Summarise. Menus float over the chat instead of pushing it down. Every setting goes with every turn, and the choices carry to your next chat in that skill, except Shop's criteria and Money's calculator, which belong to one chat. Every turn also carries the date in your time zone and your language, so a skill answers for where you are.

Price, Balanced or Performance

In a skill the mode chip in the message box becomes a tier: Price, a cheaper model and short answers; Balanced, strong models at an everyday price; Performance, the strongest models, thorough answers and more searching. Tapping a tier switches the model; picking a model by hand moves the tier to match, or to Custom when no tier lists it. Balanced is the default, and the choice is remembered for that skill's next chat. The answer style and the Performance searches follow the model actually sent, so the label is always what runs.

The first model of a list the catalogue has is the one a chat opens on; the picker stays open to change it. A skill turn costs more than a plain turn on the same model: the skill's instructions, your settings, any live data and any search go in as input tokens, and the receipt under each reply says what the turn came to. There are no estimates inside a skill. What a run costs.

Live data

Health reads the matching MedlinePlus topic, and says "from MedlinePlus.gov" when it draws on it; it never promises a drug interaction check, since none is available to it. Money reads the Bank of England Bank Rate, UK inflation and exchange rates, and crypto prices when you mention one. Each is fetched before the answer, cached, and given two and a half seconds, so a slow source never holds a turn up. Fetched text reaches the model as data it is told to quote, not obey.

Checked on your device

• A citation in Look things up must name a page the search actually read for that answer. One that does not is repaired to the real page behind the same [n], without its quote, or dropped.
• A quote in Summarise must be words from the text you pasted, or it is removed.
• The maths in Money, the arithmetic in Learn and the diff in Write run on your device, never in the model, at no cost.
• Health's emergency screen runs on your device and on the server, so the reply's care card agrees with it.

Double-check

In Look things up, Learn, Health, Money and Summarise, once there is an answer, Double-check asks a model from a different family to look for mistakes in it, in facts, maths, dates or safety, and say plainly what it would change and why. Only when you tap it, priced as one turn on that model.

Save or share

Whatever the skill made, the draft, the steps, the appointment list, the shortlist, the comparison, the sources, copies as text, saves as a file, or goes to your phone's share sheet. Fix it, Health, Translate, Money and Learn put a camera button first, for a photo of the label, the report, the menu, the statement or the question; Summarise and Health also take a PDF or a document. Attach files.

A skill is a room

A skill opens as a room whose thread carries the skill: the first send makes the room under the skill with your settings, and every line in that thread runs with the skill's instructions after the room's memory. The banner at the head of the thread names the skill; Change opens the chooser, and a pick starts a new thread in the same room under the new skill, while Ask anything starts a plain one. The settings live on the thread, so anyone in the room sees the same ones; the tier belongs to the thread and the model per line follows it. Compare, Re-run and Double-check work as in any room, and the room's memory notes a skill answer with the skill's name. The Image, Video and Audio doors are not offered inside a skill thread. askr Collab, askr Mind.

How it works

Each skill's instructions are held on our server and added to every turn of that chat, with the date, your language and your settings; no client can write them, and a request that tries is refused (code W105). The model answers in plain words plus fenced blocks of structured data with a kind, such as steps, draft, labs, calculator or citations. Your device cuts the blocks out of the reply and draws each with the skill's own component inside its own error boundary, so a bad block costs one card and never the chat; the rest is ordinary markdown, with maths typeset. Because the blocks are plain fenced JSON, every model on askr can run every skill.