Getting started with AskSia

Welcome. AskSia is built around your materials — your lectures, your slides, your readings — not a generic chatbot, and it's here to take the stress out of studying, not to do your work for you. It's a learning tool that explains things step by step and shows its sources, so you actually understand the course you're in. Getting set up is quick, and the best part is you only do it once. This guide takes you from sign-up to your first study session in a few minutes.

Make one account

Sign up once and you're set everywhere. There's no separate login for mobile, the Chrome extension, or the desktop agent — one account and one subscription unlock every AskSia product. So pick the email you'll remember, create your account, and you'll never have to set things up a second time. You can start on the Free plan with no credit card; to compare plans, visit the pricing page.

Open the web app in Chrome

The web app at asksia.ai is the full studio, and it's best experienced in Chrome. If Chrome is your browser, you'll get the smoothest version of everything AskSia can do. Just open the site, sign in with the account you made, and you're in — there's nothing to install to get going here.

Your first study session in under 5 minutes

You don't need a perfectly organized course to begin. Bring in one thing and let Sia do the rest:

1. Bring a file — upload a PDF, a photo, your Word or PowerPoint slides, an audio or video file.
2. Record a lecture — hit record at the start of class and Sia gives you a real-time transcript with speaker labels as your professor speaks; you can even ask questions while it's still running.
3. Or paste a YouTube link — drop the URL straight in.

Then hit a one-click tool in the Sia panel: Summary for the big picture, Sia Note for a clean, structured note (cues, content, and a one-line plain-English summary), or Quiz to test yourself. That's a full study session in a couple of clicks.

Every answer is cited back to your source

When Sia answers, it shows you exactly where the answer came from — page-level for PDFs, slide-level for slides, and down to the second for audio, video, and YouTube. You can click straight to that spot and check it yourself. That's the whole idea: answers from your syllabus, not the internet. AI can still make mistakes, and citations are how you verify every one.

Install the Chrome extension to sync your LMS

If your course lives in a learning management system, the Chrome extension brings AskSia right into it and syncs your course content in one click — courses, syllabi, recorded lectures, and materials. It works with Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace (D2L), Moodle, Everytime, echo360, and CyberCampus. It's read-only — it never writes anything back to your LMS — and it uses your existing login session, so it never sees your password. Each course takes about 15–45 seconds to pull in, and a synced lecture becomes a Sia Note right away. Full steps are in Install the Chrome extension.

Get the mobile app to study anywhere

Want to study on the bus or between classes? Get the mobile app on iOS or Android — it also runs on iPad. It's light and simple, with essentially the same feature set as the web app, plus camera snaps for instant explanations and live lecture recording with speaker ID. Sign in with the same account and your materials are right there waiting.

Add the desktop agent for the heavy lifting

When you need more power, the desktop agent for Mac and Windows is the tool to reach for. It can read almost any file or format and do almost anything the web app can't take — for example, .zip archives. It's also where standardized-test mock exams and study planning live. Grab it from the Mac or Windows page. Not sure which surface fits a given task? See Which AskSia should I use?

Still have questions?

If anything in setup doesn't go the way you expect, email contact@asksia.ai. During business hours the team replies within one business day.