Glossary
What each term in these docs means in Rivul AI, from AI provider and BYOK to MCP, RAG, OCR and the Rivul Index.
Terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Agent | A saved research brief (goal, sources, depth, output and skills) that searches, reads and writes a cited report when you run it on a question. |
| AI features | Everything that uses your connected AI provider: Ask Rivul answers, Research briefs, agent runs, PDF chat, editor actions and autocomplete. |
| AI model | The model you pick from your AI provider in Settings → AI provider. |
| AI provider | The company whose API you connect: Google Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Mistral, or Meta. |
| API key | Your own key for your AI provider. Separate from a Rivul MCP key. |
| Ask Rivul | Questions answered from passages in your own PDFs (retrieval-augmented generation, RAG), each cited with its page. |
| BYOK | Bring your own key: AI features run on your API key, and your provider bills you. |
| Connectors | The page listing every service Rivul AI connects to: Google Drive, Google Docs, Zotero, AI clients over MCP, and your AI provider. |
| Document OCR | Optical character recognition: text from PDFs, scans and images, on Rivul AI's own server, with no AI key. |
| Extracted text | The text Rivul AI reads from a stored PDF. Ask Rivul, Research and claim checks use it; a title alone is never evidence. |
| Fair-use limits | Rate limits per minute, hour and day that stop runaway use. They are not a quota to buy. |
| Library | Your saved papers and PDFs, with their extracted text, tags, reading status and annotations. |
| Listen | Text read aloud with your browser's voice or the Rivul voice. |
| MCP | Model Context Protocol, an open standard that lets an AI client call tools such as Rivul paper search. |
| MCP key | A key that lets an AI client call Rivul MCP without browser sign-in. It does not work with the REST API. |
| Papers | The editor for drafts, with references, claim checks, version history and export. |
| Research | A notebook that runs a question across the Rivul Index and your Library and writes a cited brief and a findings table. |
| Rivul Atlas | The name of the REST API and MCP server behind Rivul MCP, used in developer docs and code. |
| Rivul Index | Rivul AI's search index of 300M+ academic papers and their metadata. |
| Rivul MCP | Rivul paper search for AI clients such as Claude Code, Codex and Cursor, over MCP or REST. |
| Run | One execution of an agent on a question. Runs keeps each run's steps, sources and report. |
| Skill | Reusable instructions in the SKILL.md format that guide how an agent works and writes. A skill never adds tools or sources. |
| Transcribe | Speech to timestamped text from audio, video or a browser recording, on Rivul AI's own server. |
| Workspace | A container for papers and a Rivul MCP setup. An account can hold up to 2. |
Something here wrong or missing? Use the contact form.