Creating Your First Brain

What is a Super Brain?

A Super Brain is your private knowledge workspace in Elephas. Think of it as a project folder that Elephas can search and reason over. You can create separate Super Brains for different topics: one for work documents, another for research papers, another for personal notes.

Create a new Super Brain

1. Open Elephas and click New Brain in the sidebar
2. Give your Super Brain a name (e.g., "Work Documents" or "Research")
3. Optionally add a description to help you remember what this workspace is for
4. Click Create

Add your files

Once your Super Brain is created, add your documents. Elephas supports PDFs, Word documents (.docx), text files, Markdown, EPUB, and more.

1. Click Add Files in the Super Brain view
2. Select your files from Finder, or drag and drop them directly into the window
3. Elephas will index your files locally on your Mac. This may take a moment for large files

Supported file types

• Documents: PDF, DOCX, DOC, XLSX, PPTX, Pages, TXT, MD, RTF, CSV, JSON, HTML, EPUB, EML
• Images (with OCR): JPG, PNG, HEIC, GIF, WebP, TIFF
• Audio & video (with transcription): MP3, MP4, MOV, WAV, M4A, AAC
• Code files: Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Swift, Java, C/C++, Go, Ruby, PHP, and more
• Web: URLs (Elephas fetches and indexes the page content), YouTube transcripts
• Integrations: Apple Notes, Notion, Obsidian, DEVONthink, and other tools (see Integrations section)

For the complete list of supported formats, see Adding Files to Your Workspace.

Ask your first question

After indexing completes, type a question in the chat area. Elephas searches your documents and provides an answer grounded in your sources, with citations pointing to the relevant files and passages.