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8 always-on sources — no setup

Out of the box, Bird grounds answers in eight open sources with no connection step. The new citation trail primitive walks both the references and the forward citations of any paper you give it, then ranks by citation-graph proximity — much stronger relevance than keyword overlap.

OpenAlex

~250M scholarly works, topical search + DOI fetch.

Semantic Scholar

TLDRs, citation graph, embedding-based recommendations.

Crossref

Canonical DOI registry — fallback + cross-check.

Unpaywall

Best-known open-access copy of any DOI.

arXiv

Preprints — CS, ML, physics, math, stats, biology.

Europe PMC

Biomedical + life sciences, with full-text URLs.

ORCID

Researcher identity + public publication histories.

Web search

Google search, including journal sites and repositories.
Save your ORCID iD on your profile (Settings → Profile → Research identity) and Bird will pull from your publication list when you ask things like “what have I published recently on coral alkalinity?” — no need to share the iD each turn. We only ever read your public ORCID profile.

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15 connectors — one-click OAuth

Connectors extend Bird into the tools you’ve licensed. Each is connected per user, per workspace — your OAuth, your access. A colleague’s connections aren’t visible from your account.

Google Drive

Google Docs

Google Sheets

Dropbox

OneDrive

OneNote

Box

Slack

Microsoft Teams

Notion

Airtable

Linear

Asana

Monday

GitHub

Don’t see a tool you rely on? Send us feedback.

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How to connect

Open Account Settings → Connectors, click Connect on the tool you want, sign in at the provider, and you’re done. The card flips to Connected when authorisation completes.

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Picking which connectors are active in a chat

Connecting a tool makes it available. To use it in a conversation, open the connector picker in the composer and tick which connectors should be active. Fewer active sources = faster, more focused answers. Selections persist per chat. The picker also has a master Public sources switch. When off, every external source (the eight above, plus connectors) is blocked at the framework level — not just discouraged in the prompt — for that chat.

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Import your OneNote notebooks into Bower

Connecting a tool lets Bird search it in place. Importing is different: it makes a copy of your content inside Bower, as notes you can edit, search, link, and organise like anything else you’ve captured. OneNote is the first connector you can import from.
Import brings content into your workspace — the deliberate counterpart to federated search. Use it when you want your notebooks to live in Bower, not just be searchable at the source.

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How to import

  1. Connect OneNote first (above), then open Account Settings → Connectors.
  2. On the OneNote card, click Import.
  3. In the wizard, browse your notebooks → sections → pages and tick what you want. Ticking a notebook or section selects everything inside it.
  4. Choose where it lands: Create a new collection, or Add to an existing collection.
  5. Click Import. The wizard closes and the import runs in the background.

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What happens

  • Bower mirrors your OneNote structure: notebooks and sections become nested collections, and each page becomes a note.
  • Progress shows page by page in the tasks tray (bottom-right). You can keep working while it runs.
  • Each note records where it came from, so your imported content stays tied to its OneNote source.
  • Formatting carries over — tables, to-do checkboxes, and text styling — and inline images are brought across too. If an image can’t be fetched, Bower flags it on the note rather than dropping it silently.

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Good to know

  • Read-only at the source. Import never writes back to OneNote. Edits you make to an imported note stay in Bower.
  • Re-importing won’t duplicate. Bower recognises pages it has already imported, so running the same import again won’t create duplicate notes.
  • Large notebooks. A single import handles up to 500 pages. For a bigger notebook, import one section at a time.
  • Availability. Import is part of connectors, so it’s available on Individual and Team plans. Restricted-mode workspaces can’t use connectors yet.

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Privacy and security

Authorisation runs through the provider’s standard OAuth flow. We never touch your credentials.
Access tokens are held by our managed gateway (Composio). Bower stores only an opaque connection ID.
Bird sees only what your account has access to in the provider. If your admin removes your access, Bird loses it on the next search.
Bird never writes back to your connected tools. Content enters your knowledge base only when you explicitly ask Bird to save a result.
Click Disconnect and the connection is revoked at the gateway; the token is destroyed. Items previously saved into your knowledge base stay put.
Our gateway provider’s BAA isn’t signed. Connectors are blocked in Restricted-mode workspaces — enforced server-side — until that’s in place.

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Troubleshooting

OAuth tokens expire. When that happens the card shows a Re-auth badge and Bird stops using that connector until you reconnect. Click Reconnect.
Disconnect the existing connection and click Connect again. The next OAuth flow lets you sign in with the new account.
If an OAuth dance was interrupted, the card stays in Connecting… and counts toward your cap. Click Disconnect to discard the attempt and free the slot.
Bird returns a clickable link to binary files in storage tools. To analyse the contents, upload the file to your Bower workspace and Bird will read it with its built-in spreadsheet, PDF, and OCR tools.