Preparing Files for Your Knowledge Base

When a visitor asks a question, your AI agent looks through your Sources for the passages that best match it and answers from those. A passage is easy to find when it reads like an answer. A row of bare values like Happy Paws, Grooming, Lisbon doesn't read like anything, so a question such as "Where can I get my dog groomed in Lisbon?" may not match it, and the agent replies that it doesn't have that information.

A few minutes spent on layout fixes most of these misses.

Which Format to Use

Lists of Items: Directories, Products, Locations

This is where most problems happen. Pick one of the two layouts below.

Option 1: A text file, one entry per paragraph (most reliable)

Start each entry with its name, then one or two sentences that say what it is and where, then the details on labelled lines. Leave a blank line between entries.

Happy Paws Grooming
Happy Paws Grooming is a dog and cat grooming salon in Alfama, Lisbon.
It offers baths, haircuts and nail trims by appointment.
Category: Pet grooming
Address: Rua dos Remédios 12, Alfama, Lisbon
Phone: +351 210 000 001
Opening hours: Monday to Saturday, 9:00 to 18:00

Seaside Vet Clinic
Seaside Vet Clinic is a veterinary clinic in Belém, Lisbon. ...

You can save this as a .txt file, or write it in Word and upload the .docx.

Option 2: A CSV or Excel file

Spreadsheets work when they follow these rules:

• One header row at the top with plain column names: Name, City, Phone, not col_3 or cat_id.
• One item per row. Don't split one item across several rows.
• Add a Description column written as a full sentence that names the item, what it is and where it is. This is the column visitors' questions match best.
• Write values out in words. "Pet grooming", not a category code; "Lisbon", not LIS.
• Keep it to one simple table. No merged cells, totals rows, notes above the header, blank rows in the middle, or several tables on one sheet.
• Excel files: one topic per sheet. If you have several unrelated lists, upload them as separate files.

Download Sample Files

Use these as a template: replace the example entries with your own.

Guides, Policies and Manuals

• Use clear headings so each section stands on its own.
• Name things in full in each section ("our Lisbon clinic", not "the above location"). A section may be found without the one before it.
• Use text-based PDFs. Scanned pages without OCR and password-protected files can't be read.
• Keep each file to one topic rather than combining everything into one large file.

See Uploading Documents for the upload steps and processing statuses.

Questions and Answers

If your content is already a list of questions and answers, add it as FAQs in your Source. Each question and its answer stay together, which makes them easy to find.

After Uploading: Quick Checklist

1. Wait for "Ready". A file can't be searched while it's still processing.
2. Connect the Source to your chatbot. Files in a Source the chatbot doesn't use won't be searched.
3. Test with specific questions the way a visitor would ask them: "Can you recommend a dog groomer in Lisbon?" works better than "give me a place".