Temperature Settings

3 min read

Temperature is a slider from 0.0 to 1.0 inside Nutshell AI that controls how closely the summary sticks to the wording of the source document. Lower values mean more deterministic, repeatable output. Higher values mean more rephrasing and varied style — at the cost of some risk of drift away from the source.

Temperature is set per-tenant on the AI Processing Settings page in the Squirrel admin portal, independently of mode.

The four ranges

Range	Behaviour	When to use
`0.0`–`0.2`	Highly focused. Sticks very close to source wording. Output is consistent across runs.	Compliance, legal, technical documentation, audit-grade summaries
`0.3`–`0.5`	Balanced. Slightly smoother phrasing while remaining faithful to the document.	Stakeholder reports, knowledge sharing, internal docs
`0.6`–`0.8`	Expansive. More descriptive and explanatory; tone shifts toward a rewritten brief.	Executive briefings, training material
`0.9`–`1.0`	Creative. May add framing or context not present in the source.	High-level messaging only — not recommended for authoritative records

Recommended defaults

Brief mode — 0.1
Standard mode — 0.1 to 0.2
Detailed mode — 0.1

Lower temperatures favour fidelity to source over stylistic variety, which is what archived-document summaries need. Fidelity matters most on archives because the summary is often the only representation of the document that a search or Copilot query will ever see — if the summary drifts, so does what the user thinks the document says.

Reading temperature by result quality

If you find summaries too dry or repetitive, raise temperature by 0.1 at a time and re-run summarisation on a small sample using retrospective summarisation. Compare against the previous output to see whether the extra style is worth the additional variance from the source.

If you find summaries drifting or introducing framing that is not in the document, lower temperature back toward 0.1. This is the safer end for anything an auditor might read.

Sample output at different temperatures

Side-by-side sample summaries show the same document at different temperature settings so you can see the effect directly before committing a tenant-wide change.