Knowledge base

The knowledge base (KB) is where you keep the facts the AI is allowed to quote: policies, FAQs, contact details, payment methods, service descriptions. The AI searches it whenever a customer asks something it must not guess. Using the KB requires the AI Assist add-on. See Plans and billing.

What belongs in the KB#

Put stable text facts here: return and shipping policy, how to pay, phone numbers and addresses, service explanations, terms, step-by-step guides.

Do not use it for live prices, stock or opening hours. The AI takes those from the catalog, delivery settings, working hours and published branches, which override KB text. A stale price in a PDF can cause hedged replies or handoffs. See Catalog and products.

Add files#

Open Automation → Catalog & AI → Knowledge base. The Files tab lists documents and folders.

1. Select Add documents. Optionally choose a folder. Folders can be nested, and Unfiled is the root.
2. Drag files in or choose them.
3. Upload. Each file moves through queued, extracting, indexing and ready. Wait for ready before testing.
4. If a file shows failed with a retryable error, press Retry. You do not need to upload it again.

Indexing costs AI credits. PDFs and scans use more credits than text files. If credits are exhausted, the job fails and can be retried after a top-up. See Credits and usage.

Smart notes#

The Smart notes tab turns messy notes into clean, reviewable knowledge. Use it for text you typed in a chat app, voice-of-the-owner explanations, or a photo of a printed price list.

1. Open the Smart notes tab.
2. Paste text, or upload a file or an image (JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, HEIC), or pick a conversation.
3. Press Analyze notes. Sela extracts draft items in the background and never invents content: each item carries a quote from your source, and your wording and dialect are kept.
4. Open Review results. Edit or discard items, and resolve conflicts with older entries by keeping both or replacing.
5. Publish. Nothing reaches customers until a person publishes.

Only two kinds of item become searchable, and only after publishing:

Limits: pasted text up to 100,000 characters (about 30 pages), files up to 25 MB, up to 200 reviewable items per source, and 20 submissions per 10 minutes. Extraction uses credits.

Learned from chats#

When a conversation that a human operator worked on is closed, Sela can capture it as a Smart source for you to review. Only lines written by your human team count as evidence. Customer claims and earlier AI replies never become knowledge. Capture is skipped without the AI add-on, a brand, or credits. Items still need your approval. Find them under Learned from chats, and use Open the chat to see the source.

How retrieval and grounding work#

Your content is split into passages of roughly 1,600 characters with some overlap, tagged with the nearest Markdown heading, and indexed for both meaning and exact keywords. When a customer asks something, the AI calls the knowledge search tool, which returns the best few passages (up to 10). The AI must answer from those passages. Its draft is then checked against what search returned, and an unsupported claim is replaced by a hedged message. See How the AI works.

Practical consequences:

• The AI can only find what was indexed. A file in "queued" or "failed" state is invisible.
• Wording matters. A question phrased far from your document may miss. Exact names (products, areas, services) help a lot.
• If two documents disagree, the AI may quote either. Keep one canonical version.
• The AI reads everything indexed, whether or not it is published on the help centre.

Writing good KB content#

• One topic per section. Use headings, and for FAQs write the customer's question as the heading.
• Answer in the first sentence, then add detail.
• Write in your customers' language and dialect. Add the Arabic and English versions of key terms.
• Be concrete. Include numbers, days, conditions and exceptions.
• Keep one copy of each policy. Delete superseded files.
• Date time-limited information and remove it when it expires.

Weak:

We offer flexible returns on most items subject to conditions.

Strong:

## Can I return an item?
Yes, within 7 days of delivery if the item is unused and in its original packaging.
Opened cosmetics and custom-made items cannot be returned.
To start a return, send the order number here in the chat. Refunds are made in the
same payment method within 5 business days after we receive the item.

Manage, update and delete#

Each file row has a menu with Open, Open original, Download, Delete and Publish to help centre.

• Update: upload the new version, confirm it is ready, then delete the old file. Identical files are rejected, so a changed file is required.
• Delete: removes the file and its passages from AI search. Deletion asks for confirmation. Folders can be deleted from the folder tree.
• Move: organize by folder to keep the list manageable. Folders do not change what the AI can see.

Public help centre#

Any document can be published to a public help centre at /kb/<your organization id>. Nothing is published automatically. Choose Publish to help centre on a file. Publishing uses the text extracted at upload, trimmed to 20,000 characters. A document still indexing cannot be published, and an older document may ask you to Reindex (upload it again) first. Publishing is independent of the AI: unpublished documents are still used by the assistant. With an Enterprise white-label plan you can serve the portal on your own domain. See Settings and white-label.

Troubleshooting: the AI cannot find my answer#

After every change, test with a real message on the widget or a test number. More on diagnosis in Improving answer quality.