# Chat with a Word Document — Ask Questions About a DOCX File > Ask questions about a Word document and get answers with the heading each came from. Runs on your device — nothing is uploaded. Chat with Word Document reads a .docx file in your browser, keeps its heading structure, and answers questions from the passages closest to what you asked — citing the heading each passage sits under. Because Word documents have no fixed pages until something paginates them, the heading is the locator that is actually stable, and it is what you get beside every answer. Everything runs on your device with no upload and no API key. **URL:** https://convertto.tech/t/chat-with-word **Category:** On-Device AI (https://convertto.tech/c/local-ai-tools) **Privacy:** Runs entirely in the browser; no upload **Cost:** Free, no sign-up **Last updated:** 2026-08-01 ## Key facts - **Accepts:** .docx (Office Open XML). Legacy .doc cannot be read in a browser - **Citations:** The heading each passage sits under - **Uploads:** None — the document is read and answered in your browser - **Cost:** Free, with no API key or account - **Privacy:** Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded ## How to use 1. Select your word document file — the file stays on your device and is never uploaded. 2. Enter or paste your question. 3. Choose the answer model. 4. Press Run, then download the result when it is ready. ## FAQ ### Why can it not open my .doc file? A .doc is a binary OLE format from before 2007, and there is no browser-side reader for it. Open it in Word, LibreOffice or Google Docs and save it as .docx, which is a zip of XML and can be read here. ### Why does it cite headings rather than page numbers? Because a .docx has no page numbers. Pagination is computed by whatever application renders it, and depends on the fonts and page size in use, so any page number shown here would be invented. The heading a passage sits under is written in the file itself and is the same wherever you open it. ### Does it read tables, headers and footers? Table text is read as part of the body. Headers, footers, footnotes and comments are not, because they repeat across the document and would flood the index with near-identical passages that crowd out the real content. ### Is my document uploaded anywhere? No. The file is read, split, indexed and answered entirely inside this browser tab. The only thing downloaded is the model itself, from Hugging Face, and that happens once and is then cached. Nothing about your document goes the other way — which is the point of using this rather than a service on a contract, a payslip or a medical letter. ### How does it answer questions about a document too long for the model to read? The document is split into passages and each one is turned into a vector that captures its meaning. Your question is turned into a vector the same way, the closest few passages are found by comparing them, and only those passages are given to the answer model. This is the same retrieval-augmented approach the hosted services use; the difference is that here the retrieval and the answering both happen on your device. ### How accurate is it? It is a model between 65 and 400 megabytes, which is one to four orders of magnitude smaller than a hosted assistant. It is good at pulling out a fact that is stated plainly in one place and much weaker at questions requiring several parts of the document to be combined, or at anything needing judgement. That is exactly why the passages behind every answer are shown with it — the answer is a shortcut to the right paragraph, not a substitute for reading it. ### What happens if the document does not contain the answer? It says so rather than inventing one. Two separate checks make that possible: if no passage is even topically close to the question, the question is never put to the model at all, and when the extractive model is used its confidence is thresholded, because that model always returns its best guess and only its low confidence distinguishes a guess from an answer. ### Do I need an API key or an account? Neither. There is no key to obtain, no sign-up, no quota and no per-question cost. The trade is that the models are small enough to run on your own hardware, and answer quality reflects that. ### Does it work offline? After the first run, yes. The model is cached by the browser, so a second visit works with no network at all. The first visit has to download it. ## Sources - [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.11401) — arXiv - [transformers.js — running Hugging Face models in the browser](https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers.js) — Hugging Face ## Related tools - [Chat with Any Document](https://convertto.tech/t/chat-with-document): Ask questions about a PDF, Word file, spreadsheet, CSV, Markdown or text file and get answers with the passage each came from. - [Chat with Excel & CSV](https://convertto.tech/t/chat-with-excel): Ask questions about a spreadsheet in plain English and get answers with the sheet and row they came from. Runs entirely in your browser. - [Chat with PDF](https://convertto.tech/t/chat-with-pdf): Ask questions about any PDF and get answers with the page each one came from. The model runs in your browser — the file is never uploaded. - [PDF to DOCX Converter](https://convertto.tech/t/pdf-to-docx): Export PDF document content into 100% editable Microsoft Word DOCX format. - [PDF to Word Converter](https://convertto.tech/t/pdf-to-word): Convert PDFs into 100% editable Microsoft Word (.docx) documents with paragraphs, fonts, sizes and grid tables. - [Word to PDF](https://convertto.tech/t/word-to-pdf): Convert a Word .docx file to PDF entirely in your browser — headings, lists and tables intact. - [DOC to DOCX Converter](https://convertto.tech/t/doc-to-docx): Rebuild a mislabelled or malformed .doc as a clean, modern .docx. - [DOCX to DOC Converter](https://convertto.tech/t/docx-to-doc): Save a Word document in the legacy format older software can open.