--- title: "Question Answering Tool - Extract from Text | CanDoYa" description: "Use a free question answering tool to extract an answer from English text on your device. See the source passage and confidence with no text upload." url: https://candoya.com/tools/question-answering/ locale: en type: browser-tool --- # Free Question Answering Tool Category: Social & Creator ## What is a question answering tool? A question answering tool finds a short answer to a question inside context you provide. This extractive reader searches English text for one continuous answer span, reports its model confidence, and shows the source passage. The model runs inside your browser, so your context and question are not uploaded for inference. **This tool uses Xenova's uncased DistilBERT model fine-tuned on SQuAD 1.1 through Transformers.js.** It divides longer context into overlapping passages, reads each passage in a browser worker, and ranks the returned spans. WebGPU is tried first, with a WebAssembly CPU fallback when graphics acceleration is unavailable. Extractive question answering does not write a new explanation or search the web. It selects words already present in the supplied context. The first run downloads public runtime, tokenizer, and model files that total tens of megabytes. Browsers normally cache them, but cleared storage or private browsing can cause another download. ## How to use it 1. **Paste the source context** - Enter up to 6,000 characters of focused English text that contains the fact you want to find. 2. **Ask a specific question** - Use a factual question whose answer should be one continuous phrase in the context. 3. **Run the local reader** - Select Find answer, then let the first model download and on-device reading pass finish. 4. **Check the evidence** - Review the highlighted source span and confidence score, then copy the result or refine the question. ## Who it's for - **Students and researchers** locating a date, person, place, quantity, or definition in focused English notes. - **Meeting participants** checking transcript excerpts for a stated deadline, owner, decision, or follow-up. - **Support and operations teams** finding a specific policy detail in pasted documentation without uploading internal text for inference. - **Editors and fact-checkers** tracing a short answer back to the exact passage before quoting or summarizing it. ## Expert note DistilBERT was trained to select a continuous span from a passage, so it works best when the answer appears explicitly and close to the wording of the question. It cannot reliably combine facts from distant sentences, calculate a new value, or recognize that no answer exists because SQuAD 1.1 contains answerable questions. Treat a low score as a prompt to narrow the context or verify manually. ## Frequently asked questions ### Is my context or question uploaded? No. The context and question are sent only to a worker in your browser for inference. The worker downloads the public Transformers.js runtime and DistilBERT model files from their hosts, but those file requests do not include the text you entered. CanDoYa does not run a question answering API for this tool. ### Is the question answering tool free? Yes. There is no account, API key, payment, or server-side usage quota. Your device performs the model inference. You still use network data for the first public runtime and model download, and the browser needs enough memory and storage to load and cache those files. ### How much context can I use? You can enter up to 6,000 Unicode characters of context and a question up to 300 characters. Longer context is divided into overlapping passages of at most 1,400 characters. Focused context usually gives clearer results because fewer unrelated phrases compete as possible answer spans. ### What kind of questions work best? Ask factual English questions whose answer appears as one continuous phrase, such as who, when, where, how many, or what a term means. Questions that require arithmetic, outside knowledge, opinion, multi-step reasoning, or combining distant passages do not match this extractive model's training task. ### What does the confidence score mean? The score ranks how strongly the model preferred the selected start and end tokens for this question and context. It is not a guarantee that the answer is true or complete. Compare the highlighted passage with the question, especially when the score is low or the wording is ambiguous. ### Can the model say that the context has no answer? Not reliably. This DistilBERT checkpoint was fine-tuned on SQuAD 1.1, where each training question has an answer in the passage. It will often select some span even when your context does not contain a good answer. A weak or unrelated result should be treated as no useful answer and checked manually. ### Which languages does the reader support? The selected DistilBERT checkpoint and SQuAD fine-tuning are English, so the page marks the tool English only. Text in another language may still produce an output, but that output lacks the same training basis and should not be treated as a reliable reading-comprehension result. ### Does question answering work without WebGPU? Yes. The worker tries WebGPU when the browser and graphics adapter expose it. If that path is unavailable or fails, the tool restarts with the WebAssembly CPU backend. The fallback keeps the context on your device, but loading and inference may take longer. ## Related tools - [Text Summarizer](https://candoya.com/tools/text-summarizer/) - [Keyword Extractor](https://candoya.com/tools/keyword-extractor/) - [Named Entity Recognition](https://candoya.com/tools/named-entity-recognition/) - [Text Similarity](https://candoya.com/tools/text-similarity/) - [Zero-Shot Classifier](https://candoya.com/tools/zero-shot-classifier/) --- *Markdown edition of , published for AI agents and other automated readers. Index of key pages: .*