RAG knowledge search
Ask questions of your policies, circulars and manuals, and get answers grounded in your own documents, with a citation behind every one.
Overview
The answer existed, but finding it took days.
Years of circulars, amendments and manuals, spread across folders and formats. Sumato's retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) search reads them all and answers questions in plain language. Every answer points to the exact page it came from, so people can trust it and verify it.
Answers, not links
Get a direct answer in plain language instead of a list of files to open.
Every answer cited
Each response links to the source document and page, so it can be checked.
Always current
New circulars are indexed as they are published, and superseded rules are flagged.
Regional languages
Ask in English, Hindi, Assamese or Bengali and search across all of them.
Capabilities
Search built for documents that matter
Designed for policy, legal and procedural content, where a confident wrong answer is worse than no answer.
Hybrid retrieval
Combines semantic and keyword search, so exact clause numbers and loosely worded questions both work.
Source citations
Highlights the passage that supports each answer and links straight to it.
OCR for scanned files
Old scanned circulars and gazettes become searchable text, including tables.
Version awareness
Understands amendments and tells you when a newer rule supersedes an older one.
Guardrails
Says "not found in your documents" rather than inventing an answer.
Access-aware results
People only see answers drawn from documents they are allowed to read.
How it works
How an answer is built
- 01
Documents are ingested
PDFs, scans and web pages are cleaned, split into passages and indexed.
- 02
A question is asked
The question is matched against the index using meaning as well as keywords.
- 03
Passages are retrieved
The most relevant passages, and their versions, are selected and ranked.
- 04
A cited answer is generated
The language model answers only from those passages and cites each one.
Use cases
Where it makes a difference
Policy and rules desks
Give officials instant, verifiable answers on service rules and procedures.
- Service and leave rules
- Financial delegation limits
- Procurement procedures
Citizen helpdesks
Help front-line staff answer scheme eligibility questions correctly the first time.
- Scheme eligibility checks
- Required document lists
- Grievance status guidance
Compliance teams
Find every obligation across contracts and regulations in seconds.
- Regulatory clause lookup
- Contract obligation search
- Audit evidence retrieval
Results
Measurable results
10,000+
pages made instantly answerable for one institution
Seconds
to find the right clause, compared with hours
100%
of answers linked to a source passage
Indicative figures from Sumato deployments. Outcomes depend on data, scale and adoption.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What is retrieval-augmented generation?
RAG first retrieves the passages from your own documents that are relevant to a question, then asks a language model to answer using only those passages. This keeps answers grounded and citable.
What happens if the answer isn't in our documents?
The system says so clearly. It is configured to decline rather than guess when it can't find supporting evidence.
Can it handle scanned and old documents?
Yes. Scanned PDFs and images go through OCR, including Indic scripts, before they are indexed.
Is our data used to train public models?
No. Your documents stay in your deployment and are never used to train third-party models.
Take the next step
Tell us about the problem in front of you. A Sumato solution architect will walk you through a live demo and an honest view of what it takes to solve it.
