Chat Complex Documents

What this does (in plain terms)

You have documents — contracts, reports, slide decks, scanned PDFs, spreadsheets, emails, images — and you want the assistant to reliably get the content out of them and make it usable: searchable, answerable, summarizable, or ready to feed a knowledge base or another tool.

Unstructured Transform does exactly that. Hand it files and it turns them into clean, structured, AI-ready data across 60+ formats with one pipeline — no custom parsing or OCR to build and maintain. See the Transform overview.

Under the hood it:

• Partitions each document into structured elements (titles, paragraphs, tables, lists), adjusting extraction per page for accuracy and cost.
• Enriches the result with metadata, table and image descriptions, and entity recognition.

The result is structured JSON that's ready for search, Q&A, summarization, and agents.

Why people use it

• Make documents searchable and answerable. Transform extracts clean, structured text and tables from your files so the assistant can search them and answer questions grounded in the source.
• Handle messy, varied files. One integration covers 60+ formats (scanned PDFs, tables, images, Office files) instead of a per-format parser.

When to use

USE THIS SKILL WHEN:

• The user wants to extract or structure content from documents (PDF, Office, images, emails, scanned files).
• The user wants documents made searchable or ready for RAG / Q&A / a knowledge base.
• The user asks to connect Unstructured or Unstructured Transform.
• A Transform tool returns an auth error → re-run the auth step below.

Prerequisites

• An Unstructured account to sign in with during the OAuth step (a free tier is available). See pricing.
• Nothing to install locally — Transform is a hosted MCP server.

Setup

Step 1 — Detect your environment

Determine which command tool to use for every command in this skill:

• If host_bash is available → you are on the desktop app. Use host_bash for all commands (the auth step opens your local browser).
• If it is unavailable → you are on the web app. Use bash for all commands (the platform handles the browser redirect).