Chat With Your Google Drive Files in Scholarly

Your documents already live in Drive

For most professionals, Google Drive is where the real material is: the process doc, the contract draft, the research notes, the deck from last quarter. Until now, getting that material into Scholarly meant downloading a file and re-uploading it — fine once, tedious every week.

Connections closes that gap. It's a new page in your sidebar, directly below Library, where you link one or more Google accounts. Once connected, Chat can search and read the Drive files you've shared with Scholarly and answer with your own documents as the source — the same grounded, cited answers Scholarly gives for anything in your library.

What you can do with it

Pick Drive files as sources, anywhere sources go. The Drive picker works in Chat, Deep Research, and the create windows. Choose a Google Doc, Sheet, Slides deck, PDF, Word file, PowerPoint, or plain text file straight from Drive — no downloading and re-uploading — and generate AI slides, podcasts, quizzes, or study guides from it like any other source.

Ask Chat about your shared files. Once you've shared files through the picker, Chat can find and read them on its own. Ask it to summarize the latest draft, compare two versions of a proposal, or pull the numbers out of a shared spreadsheet. Chat loads its Drive tools only when a question actually needs them, so the rest of your conversations stay fast and focused.

Connect more than one Google account. Work and personal Drives don't have to mix. Each connected account is managed independently — its own access, its own reconnect and disconnect controls — and you choose which account is the default for Chat.

Read-only, per-file, opt-in

We built Connections deliberately narrow, because it touches your files:

• Read-only. Scholarly can never edit, share, move, or delete anything in your Google account. It cannot send email or change anything on your behalf.
• Per-file. Scholarly sees only the files you share through the Drive picker — never your whole Drive. If you haven't shared a file, Chat can't read it.
• Opt-in. Nothing is connected by default, Google shows you the exact permission before you approve it, and you can disconnect any account at any time from the Connections page.

That per-file model means you stay in control of scope: share the three documents a project needs, and that's all Scholarly can see.

How to set it up

1. Open Connections in the sidebar.
2. Select Google Workspace, then Add Google account.
3. Approve the read-only permission on Google's consent screen.

That's it — the account appears on the Connections page with its plugin toggle, and files you pick from Drive become available to Chat from then on. Connecting Google is included on every plan, including Free.

What's next

Drive is the first Connections plugin, not the last. The Connections page is built as a directory: as we add more services — Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Slides are on the roadmap — each will appear there with the same account-level controls and the same read-only stance.

If you keep your working documents in Drive, this is the fastest way to put them to work: connect an account, share a file, and ask. See the Connections guide for the full details, or open Connections to link your first account.