Getting started with Textual

When you sign up for a Tonic Textual account, you can immediately set up access to the Textual API or get started with a new dataset.

Note that these instructions are for setting up a new account on Textual Cloud. For a self-hosted instance, depending on how it is set up, you might either create an account manually or use single sign-on (SSO).

Signing up for Textual

To get started with a new Textual account:

1. Go to https://textual.tonic.ai/.

2. Click Sign up.

3. Enter your email address.

4. Create and confirm a password for your Textual account.

5. Click Sign Up.

Textual creates your account and displays the Textual home page.

It also displays a Getting Started panel that prompts you to either create a Textual API key or to create a Textual dataset.

Creating an API key

From the Getting Started panel, to create a Textual API key:

1. Click Create an API Key.

2. In the Name field, type a name to use to identify the key.

3. Click Create API Key. Textual displays the key value, and prompts you to copy the key. If you do not copy the key and save it to a file, then you will not have access to the key. To copy the key, click the copy icon.

4. Click Close.

Textual adds the key to the API Keys panel at the top right of the Textual home page. From there, you can add and revoke API keys.

For details about managing API keys, go to Creating and revoking Textual API keys.

For details about using the Textual API to perform tasks, go to Using the Textual API.

For details about the available Tonic classes, go to the generated API documentation.

Using the Playground to preview Textual detection

The Textual Playground page allows you to see how Textual detects values in plain text. You can either have Textual redact the values, or use a large language model (LLM) to replace detected values with realistic synthesized values.

To display the Playground page, in the navigation menu, click Playground.

Displaying synthesized or redacted values

On the Playground page, as you enter text in the left text area, the synthesized or redacted version displays at the right. It also displays the API redaction response.

On a self-hosted instance of Textual, to use the LLM synthesis option, you must set an OpenAI key as the value of the environment variable SOLAR_OPENAI_KEY.

By default, the Playground page uses an LLM to generate synthesized values. Synthesized values are realistic replacement values. Synthesis is enabled when Enable LLM Synthesis is in the on position.

Playground page with synthesized values from an LLM

You can also choose to display redacted values. Redaction replaces the detected values with placeholder values that represent the value types. To display redacted values, toggle Enable LLM Synthesis to the off position.

Playground page with redacted values

Clearing the text

To clear the text, click Clear.

Selecting a text sample

Textual also provides sample text options for some common use cases. To populate the text with a sample, click Try a Sample, then select the type of sample.

Dropdown list of sample text options

Creating your first Textual dataset

From the Getting Started panel, you can create your first Textual dataset. You can either create a dataset using your own files, or create a dataset that uses Textual sample files.

Using your files

To create a dataset from your own files:

1. Click Upload Files.

2. On the Upload files to redact panel, to select the files to include in the dataset, either:

   • Drag and drop the files to the panel.

   • Click Select Files to Upload, then navigate to and select the files.

Textual displays the dataset details page for the new dataset.

Using the Textual sample dataset

To create a dataset using Textual sample data, on the home page, click Try Demo Dataset.