Help
Short answers to the questions that matter. Anything unanswered here is an email away, and a person replies.
- Why not just upload my files to ChatGPT myself?
- Uploads go stale; Syla can't lie about your deadlines. An uploaded syllabus is a photograph of your class on the day you saved it — when a professor moves a deadline or posts a rubric, the copy in your chat answers confidently from the old world. Syla stays synced, answers date questions from Canvas records rather than from searching documents, holds your whole term at once (a real semester is hundreds of files — nobody uploads that, and no chat can hold it), and remembers what you've asked and struggled with across every conversation. Uploading a PDF is fine for one question about one lecture. Syla is for the other fifteen weeks.
- Does Syla see my Canvas password?
- No, never. The extension reads Canvas through the session you already have in your browser, the same way the Canvas website itself does. Your password, and your school login with its Duo or SSO steps, are never sent to Syla.
- What can ChatGPT actually see?
- Only the passages relevant to the question you just asked, with citations, never a bulk export of your coursework. Every request is logged, and you can read exactly what any assistant retrieved under Settings → Privacy & data.
- Can Syla submit assignments or change anything in Canvas?
- No. There is no code path that submits, posts, edits, or deletes anything in Canvas, and no plan to add one. The only thing an assistant can save is a study memory you explicitly ask it to keep, and that lives in Syla, visible and deletable in your settings. An assistant can help you prepare work; a person presses submit.
- ChatGPT answered something wrong about my class. What do I do?
- First check the citation: every Syla-grounded answer names the file and page it came from, so you can see whether the source is stale or the model over-reached past it. If a deadline or grade looks wrong, sync again from the extension, then check the course page in Syla. Still wrong? Report it: wrong answers about deadlines are the thing we most want to hear about.
- My sync says a course failed or files are restricted.
- Some schools lock the Files tab while leaving modules readable; Syla recovers what it can through modules and tells you what it could not reach. If the sync says Canvas signed you out, open a Canvas tab, sign in, and sync again. The popup's activity log shows exactly what happened to every course.
- How do I disconnect or delete everything?
- Connections disconnects an assistant or a browser in one click, effective immediately. Deleting a course removes its files and index. Deleting your account (Settings → Privacy & data) removes everything, including stored files. Your Canvas account is untouched by any of it.
- Is this academic dishonesty?
- Syla organizes your own course material and gives your AI honest, cited access to it, the same materials you can already read, search, and study. It does not take exams, write submissions, or act as you. Your school's policies on AI assistance still apply to how you use what your assistant tells you.
- Something else is broken.
- Email founder@usesyla.app and a real person reads it. If an error screen gave you a request id, include it: it turns minutes of description into a one-line lookup. Signed in, the fastest path is the account menu's Report a problem, which pre-fills what we need.
See also the privacy policy, the terms, and docs for building on Syla.