Import a book with your AI assistant

Importing from the menu brings in the text, but you create the sheets yourself (Bring in a book you've already written). If you ask your AI assistant instead, it gives you back a populated work: the book split into chapters and, in the same conversation, the sheets for the characters, places, objects and organizations, with their aliases and relationships.

Before you start

Your assistant needs to be connected to Exaratio. You do this only once, from the Tools menu, under AI agents (MCP) (Connect your AI assistant to Exaratio).

Ask in your own words

Tell it which file and which work. For example:

• “Import my book The Cartographer.epub, which is in Documents, into the open work, and create its characters, places and objects.”
• “Import this Word file with one chapter per heading and create sheets for all the characters, including the minor ones.”

There's no need to ask for each step. Your assistant knows you expect the finished work in one go.

What your assistant does

1. It can check the file before importing, just as Exaratio does from the menu: whether it can be imported, how many headings it has, whether there are parts.
2. It imports the book, splitting it into chapters by its headings, and leaves each chapter in order: its title on the page, the headings with their style and the prose justified with an indent (Bring in a book you've already written).
3. It reads the report Exaratio gives it:
   • the names the text writes as proper names, how many times and in which sentences;
   • the expressions that repeat, like “the fox” or “the captain”, which sometimes name a character;
   • the dates that appear.
4. It decides, by reading, what each name is: a character (including an animal with a role in the story), a place, an object or an organization. It discards anything that's capitalized only because it starts a sentence.
5. It creates all the sheets at once, each with its type, a short description and, as aliases, the other ways the text names it (a nickname, a title, the first name), along with the main relationships: family, friendship, who serves whom, where each one lives.
6. It checks where each one appears in the text, and lets you know if any name is ambiguous.

What else you can ask for

• Dates and timelines: “Find the dates in the book and build a timeline with the scenes.” Exaratio points out the time expressions in each chapter, including relative ones like “the next day”, and your assistant decides which ones belong to the story.
• Portraits and images: the images in an EPUB or a Word file go into the work's library. Ask it to link each portrait to its character, or the map to its place.
• The book's details: the file usually carries the title, the author or the translator. Ask it to carry them over to the work.
• A saga in a single file: if each part of the file is really a book, ask it to import it into a new work with one book per part (A series: several books in one work).
• More characters: if the book is long, the report lists the most frequent names first. Ask it to also review the ones that appear only a few times.

What it asks you

Only what it can't decide by reading. For example, whether two different characters share a name, or whether “the Director” is always the same person. It works out the rest on its own and tells you at the end what it created.

Review and undo

Everything your assistant does is saved in the work right away and noted in its history. The sheets are created together, so they're undone together: just ask it to “undo the last thing you did” (Review and undo what your assistant did).