FAQ
The questions worth answering honestly.
Why not just ask ChatGPT?
Because it doesn’t have your manual.
Ask a general chatbot about your dashboard light and you’ll get a plausible answer about tire pressure monitoring systems in general. Xgest answers from the manual for your exact car, your exact trim, your exact model year — the copy sitting on your phone — and shows you the page.
The difference matters most when the general answer is close but wrong.
What manuals does it have?
None. It has whatever you add.
Xgest isn’t a library. There’s no catalogue to search, nothing to browse, no manuals bundled in. You bring the manual for the thing you own, and it stays yours. That’s a deliberate line: hosting other people’s manuals is someone else’s business, and a legally messier one.
Does it work for anything other than cars?
Yes — cars are just the obvious case. Ranges, dishwashers, washers, receivers, garage door openers, mowers, drills, thermostats. Anything with a PDF manual you were never going to read cover to cover.
The pattern is the same everywhere: you own a thing, the thing has a 100-page book, and you need one paragraph of it right now.
Can I trust the answer?
Trust the page. That’s why it’s there.
Xgest answers only from your manual, cites the printed page numbers it used, and will tell you plainly when your manual doesn’t actually cover something rather than filling the gap with a guess. Tap any citation and you’re reading the real PDF, unaltered.
For anything that matters — brakes, towing, self-clean cycles — read the page. The answer is there to get you to the right page in five seconds instead of fifteen minutes.
What if it reads my photo wrong?
You’ll see it. The app shows what it thought the symbol was (“Looks like: amber tire pressure warning light”) right above the answer, and it says “This might be” instead when it isn’t confident.
The camera only ever identifies — it never writes the answer. So a misread shows up next to a cited page that contradicts it.
One tip: photograph one symbol, not the whole dashboard. A single symbol works far better than fifteen at once.
Does it work without a connection?
Partly, and it’s honest about which parts.
Reading and searching your manuals work with no signal, because they’re on your phone. Search is a plain word search offline — it finds the page when your words match your manual’s words.
Answering and identifying photos need a connection. Translating “orange horseshoe light” into “TPMS” is the step that can’t happen locally, and it’s the step that makes the rest work.
Why “Xgest”?
Because it’s short, it was available, and I’d rather spend the time on the app.
It won’t take my manual
If Xgest refuses a PDF, it’s almost certainly a scan — photographs of pages with no text layer behind them. Xgest can’t read those yet, and it says so rather than importing it and then answering nothing.
Try a copy downloaded from the maker’s site; those are nearly always proper text PDFs. OCR is on the list.
Who makes this?
Don Bonaddio — one person, in the hours around a day job. Xgest exists because I was standing in my driveway squinting at a warning light with a 532-page PDF on my phone and no idea what to search for.
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