The Strangest Things People Upload to Turbo

A while back we wrote about a coworker using Turbo to run a database of skincare reviews, and I ended that post by asking people to tell us about their own off-label workflows. Enough of you did that it seemed worth writing up.

To be clear about where this came from: we do not go through your uploads. Everything below is a workflow somebody described to us themselves, in replies to that post, in DMs, and in a few calls we did afterwards to ask follow-up questions.

We built Turbo for lectures, textbooks, and slide decks. Students are still who we build for first. But the underlying thing it does — take a dense document nobody wants to read and turn it into something you can actually work with — turns out to apply to a lot of documents that are not lectures.

1. Product reviews

The first one anybody told us about, and still my favorite. Beauty reviews on YouTube run twenty-plus minutes and bury the four useful sentences between a sponsor read and a discount code. Dropping them in as links and letting Turbo pull out the verdict is a better way to watch them.

The part I did not expect is people doing this with a hundred videos and then querying across the whole collection. At that point it is less note-taking than a personal research database, which is not something we designed for.

2. Leases and contracts

Apartment leases, phone contracts, terms of service, insurance policies. Long documents that most people skim, which is exactly the case for reading them properly.

The questions people described asking were almost always the same three: what am I agreeing to, what can they change without telling me, and how do I get out. Obvious caveat that this is not legal advice and a summary is not a lawyer.

3. Health and genome reports

This is the one I find most interesting.

A few people told us they had put bloodwork panels and DNA test reports through it. These are genuinely hard documents: dense tables, gene symbols with no explanation, and confidence language that is difficult to weigh if you have not taken a biology class. Asking questions against the report itself works well, because the answers come from your document rather than from a general claim about what a gene means in the abstract.

That got me looking into it, and I came across a company I thought was fascinating. Lifecode launched this month doing whole genome sequencing — the entire sequence at clinical depth, rather than the sliver of it a $99 kit checks — for a few hundred dollars. The report covers how you metabolize specific drugs, what your disease risks look like, and a long list of traits.

But the cheap sequencing is not the interesting half. They also built an MCP server for your own genome, which they describe as the first one that has ever existed, and I have not found anything to contradict that. It means you can point an AI agent straight at your sequence and ask it things in plain English. Your assistant reads the genotype at a specific gene, or checks the read depth to know how much to trust a call, and the sequence itself never moves.

This is the part I keep thinking about. Every learning tool, ours included, teaches you about the world — material that is the same for everyone who studies it. Two million people study the same diagram. Here the source material could be you: not a general article about what a gene does, but a question about your own genome with your own answer. Imagine being able to learn what makes you, you. That seems like a genuinely new thing to be able to do.

Also worth saying plainly: none of this is medical advice, a consumer report is not a diagnosis, and if something in your results worries you the next step is a genetic counselor or your doctor rather than any chat window, ours included.

4. Hobbies, taken far too seriously

The category I have the least explanation for. Chess opening theory. Espresso dialing-in guides. Aviation exam material. Long-running fantasy series where somebody has built a study system for keeping track of the fictional politics.

These are all the same thing structurally: a body of material with too much detail to hold in your head, that you care about enough to want to know properly. Which, put that way, is just a description of studying.

Keep sending them

None of this means Turbo is pivoting. It is a study tool, students are the people we build for first, and that is not changing. But the off-label workflows are where we tend to learn what the product is actually good at.

So if you are using Turbo for something we did not plan for, tell us. It ends up in the roadmap more often than you would think.