The most common question we get about Oak Tree is really a worry wearing a question's clothes: "Wait — is the AI just going to make things up?"
It's a fair thing to wonder. A lot of AI products are built to sound confident whether or not they actually know something, and if you're trusting a tool with your family's actual history, "confident but wrong" is worse than useless — it's actively harmful. So here's a plain answer, no marketing language.
What Ask Family actually does: when you ask a question — "Grandma, what was it like during the Depression?" — the system looks only at the stories that specific family member has actually shared in Oak Tree, and answers using only what's there, written in first person, in their voice. If your grandmother told a story about the Depression, that's what the answer draws from. If she didn't, the answer says so, plainly, instead of guessing at something that sounds plausible.
What it doesn't do: it doesn't know anything about your grandmother beyond what's actually been typed or recorded into her stories. It doesn't infer a birthdate from context, doesn't assume who was at a family event unless a story says so directly, and doesn't fill narrative gaps with a plausible-sounding invention. If you ask about something nobody wrote down, the honest answer is "I don't have that story yet" — not a confident-sounding guess.
This is also why the library matters more than the AI. Ask Family isn't a separate, smarter thing bolted onto your family's stories — it's just a way to have a conversation with the stories that are already there. An empty library gives you empty, honest answers. A full one gives you a real conversation, still built entirely out of what someone actually chose to share.
We built it this way on purpose. It would be technically easier to let the AI smooth over gaps and guess at what's "probably true" — it might even feel more impressive the first time you try it. But a family history that's confidently wrong is worse than one that's honestly incomplete, so we didn't build it that way.
If you want to see exactly what's behind an answer, everything Ask Family draws from lives in Browse Stories and My Library too — nothing it says comes from anywhere else.