Ask the assistant

Every request carries an organization API key. A key has one of two scopes. A full key reaches every operation in this document and belongs on your server. A search key is the one to ship in a browser widget or a storefront page: it reaches only the operations marked x-nova-key-scope: search — searching, federated search, recommendations, event ingestion, and the visitor-facing AI operations (semantic and image search, voice transcription and voice search, assistant chat, and the visitor's own conversation). It cannot write documents or read or change configuration; any other operation answers 403. AI operations are paid in credits from the organization's wallet whichever key calls them (402 when the balance runs out), and a search key needs X-NOVA-SESSION-ID on them: the session is what a conversation belongs to, and what the per-session allowance (429) is counted against. A key of either scope may additionally carry restrictions set in the console: an allowlist of collections (403 elsewhere), a forced filter_by per collection that is ANDed into every search (document-level access control), an allowlist of fields (include_fields is limited to it and a request naming any other field in query_by, facet_by, sort_by, filter_by or highlight_fields answers 400), an IP/CIDR allowlist and an Origin/Referer allowlist (403), and a per-key rate limit (429 with Retry-After).

In: header