askM 1.2 — Enhanced Search, and citations you can trust

askM 1.2 is about trust in the answer. The retrieval pipeline behind every question has been rebuilt end to end — how manuals are parsed and chunked, how passages are found, and how honestly the sources are reported back to you.

The headline is Enhanced Search: an optional on-device embedding model (about 350 MB, downloaded once from Settings) that upgrades semantic retrieval. We measure askM against a set of graded dispatch questions on a real MMEL — with Enhanced Search, the correct passage reaches the top five results 91% of the time, up from 68%. Everything still runs entirely on your iPad or Mac: no cloud, no telemetry, downloads happen once and stay on your device.

Citations are now honest by construction. Previously, an answer could list sources that never actually fit into the model’s context; 1.2 packs the context by real token count and numbers sources as they are packed — every citation you see was read by the model, no more and no less. A new aircraft guard applies the same honesty to fleet filtering: if nothing matches your selected aircraft, askM says so instead of quietly answering from another aircraft’s documentation, and the optional wider search is clearly flagged on any answer that used it.

The index itself is now versioned. When an update changes how manuals are processed — as this one does — askM detects the older index and offers a one-tap rebuild, with each stage visible as it runs: clear, load the embedding model, parse-chunk-embed, finalise. Under the hood, 1.2 also fixes document-extraction bugs (duplicated table rows, headings bleeding between sections, lost degree symbols), repairs interrupted indexing runs automatically, and adds a memory manager that keeps the language model and the optional search models within device limits.

Full details on the askM app page. askM 1.2 is a free update on the App Store for iPad (Apple Silicon, iPadOS 18+) and Mac (Apple Silicon, macOS 15+). askM remains a personal study aid — always defer to the authoritative published manuals and your operator’s procedures.