Engineering

Grounded answers, and the value of saying I do not know

An assistant that declines is more useful than one that guesses. Building the declining part took longer than building the answering part.

14 August 2026 · 8 min read
Grounded answers, and the value of saying I do not know

Ask a model about a meeting and it will answer. It will answer whether or not the meeting covered the thing you asked about, and it will sound the same either way.

That is fine when you are writing a first draft and fatal when someone is about to act on it. So the interesting engineering in Expo is not the answering. It is working out when not to.

Every answer is built from a retrieved window of the transcript, and every claim carries the span it came from. If the retrieval comes back thin, we do not lower the bar and answer anyway. We return the insufficient context state and show what we did find.

People trust it more as a result, which is the entire point. An assistant you have to double check is an assistant you stop using by Thursday.

Stay in the conversation. Expo keeps the record.

Free while the beta runs. Install it, take one call with it, and see whether you go back to typing while somebody talks.

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