RECKONAR
Tech blogAsk Reckonar 4 min read

Ask Reckonar: where its answers come from and where they stop

Ask Reckonar talks through your Hunt Area's analysis, saved Plans and notes. Every number in an answer comes from a solver or your own records.

Diagram titled Your record makes Ask sharper. Three inputs flow into Reckonar's AI: a large glowing Your record card (sightings and sign, stands and cameras, bedding, food and water, notes, saved Plans and your Camp's marks), an Expert principles card and a smaller Solver results card. On the right, three example answers grow more specific as more is on record, and a dashed loop returns what you mark after each hunt to your record.

It is Thursday night and you have one sit on Saturday, with a northwest wind in the forecast. You have a saved Plan with three setups and a note about a buck crossing the creek bottom at first light. Ask Reckonar is where you talk that through with something that has read your ground.

The short version

  • 01Ask Reckonar is a chat about one Hunt Area. It reads Reckonar’s analysis of that ground, your saved Plans, and the notes and pins you and your Camp recorded.
  • 02Your record and expert whitetail scouting principles carry real weight in every answer. The more you mark, the more specific Ask can be.
  • 03The language model explains and weighs evidence. Every number in an answer comes from a solver, a saved Plan or your own notes.
  • 04Ask is implemented and partly tested, and quality improvements are underway with experienced hunters.

Solvers measure, the AI explains

Language models are unreliable at measurement. A chatbot asked how far a bench sits from your truck may invent a confident number, so Reckonar keeps measuring out of the model’s hands.

Deterministic solvers build the terrain from USGS 3DEP lidar and model wind, scent, bedding and travel. Given the same inputs, a solver returns the same result every time. Ask weighs those results and your records against expert whitetail scouting principles and explains which ones matter for your question. Any distance, wind or score it quotes traces to a solver output, a measurement Reckonar’s code made on the map, your saved Plan or a note you wrote. A figure that cannot be traced is held back before you see the answer.

Three cards labeled Solvers compute, Reckonar's AI reasons and You decide. Public data feeds the solvers. Expert whitetail scouting principles and your own record feed the AI.
FIG 1Diagram, not product output. Public data feeds the solvers, while expert whitetail scouting principles and your own record feed the AI. What you mark after a hunt becomes part of the next answer.

The more you record, the better it reasons

On new ground with nothing marked, Ask can only read the terrain and conditions, so its answers stay general. Every sighting, rub line, stand, camera note and saved Plan you add gives it something specific to weigh, so it can tie its advice to what you saw and check a hunch against what you logged last week. Expert whitetail scouting principles are the other half. Ask weighs your record and the solvers’ results against them to explain why one setup beats another.

Three columns listing what an Ask conversation always includes, what you choose, and what it never reads.
FIG 2Diagram, not product output. One conversation reads everything you are allowed to see in one Hunt Area, including pins and layers you have hidden on the map. It reads what you wrote about a trail-camera photo and never the photo itself.

With no Plan selected, Ask works from the terrain analysis and your notes. It adds the latest National Weather Service observation and the area’s wind history for the current calendar month from NOAA station records, and it does not present that history as a forecast.

Answers that point at the ground

An answer opens with the short answer, then adds parts headed Where to look, Why and Next move where they help, much like a briefing at the truck. Places named in the text are tappable, and so are the layers it cites.

Ask open beside the 3D map of the demo Hunt Area. The answer's Saddle B card is selected in the text, and a glowing four-point star labeled Saddle B marks the same place on the terrain.
FIG 3GWNF - Ramseys Draft demo Hunt Area. Tapping a place in the answer lights up the same place on the 3D map in the same color. The four-point star marks a place Ask picked out itself, while your own pins keep their usual glyph.

A starred place is a lead for you to check on foot. Its outline is a rough sketch around evidence the answer cited, and it is never saved as your content.

The same answer with its Travel button turned on. The Travel layer covers the demo Hunt Area on the 3D map, with its legend in the corner.
FIG 4GWNF - Ramseys Draft demo Hunt Area. The Travel button in the answer opened the Travel layer the answer cited. That layer was already computed, so nothing new ran.

Ask is built to explain its reasoning. A good answer says why a bench above a crossing might outrank a spot beside your parking, and when a single sighting is still short of a pattern. It is a tool for the night before a hunt or the evening back at camp. Reckonar has no live animal data, and Ask does not coach you during a sit.

Depth, allowance and privacy

Field brief is the default depth. Detailed strategist analysis goes deeper and uses more of your allowance, and rereading a saved answer costs nothing.

Your Ask conversations are not shared with your Camp, even in a Hunt Area you share with it. Reckonar keeps them so you can reopen them, and Reckonar staff may review them to support and improve the product, as our Privacy Policy describes.

Commercial AI providers generate the answers under terms that restrict training on your content, and Reckonar does not opt it into provider training. Providers may keep some data for security, abuse prevention or temporary caching. Reckonar’s own in-house model training is a separate Data defaults setting. It is on by default for new accounts, and you can turn it off at any time. It never lets a third-party provider train on your content.

What we don’t claim yet

  • Ask is implemented, and the parts that read terrain and tie numbers to sources have automated tests. Quality improvements are underway with experienced hunters.
  • The checks confirm that figures, dates and places match their sources. They cannot confirm every line of reasoning, and a loose word like “nearby” can slip through.
  • Ask needs a connection and does not work offline.

Where to find it in Reckonar

In the web app, open a Hunt Area in Field, then Plan, then Ask Reckonar. Starter chips such as “Give me a first read of this land” help with a first question. Jobs shows answers that are still running, and History keeps your chats for each Hunt Area. Record what you see with Mark so the next answer has more to work with, and rate each answer Helpful or Not helpful so we can see where Ask falls short.

Open Reckonar →Read the guide