Adding knowledge to a ChatFrom chatbot
Updated
How a ChatFrom chatbot answers from your files, website, text and Q&A, how much you can add, what it costs, and how to get good answers.
What is the knowledge base?
The knowledge base is what a ChatFrom chatbot answers from. The AI model already knows a lot about the world, but nothing about your business: what you sell, what it costs, when you are open, how returns work. You add your own documents and web pages, and the chatbot answers from them instead of guessing.
How does the chatbot use my knowledge?
ChatFrom does not train the model on your documents. It cuts each source into short passages and indexes them by meaning and by keywords. When a question comes in, it finds the few passages that fit best and the model writes the answer from those. So a change takes effect as soon as the source is added again, and a question worded differently from your page still finds the right passage. Each answer shows which source it came from, so you can check it and fix the source if something is wrong. A page from your website links to itself and opens in a new tab, and any source opens to show the passage the answer used.
What can I add?
Under Knowledge there are four ways to add it:
- Files: PDF, plain text, Markdown or HTML files.
- Website: enter your website's address and press Fetch pages. ChatFrom finds your pages, you tick the ones you want, and they are added.
- Text: paste anything that is not written down elsewhere, such as opening hours or a short policy.
- Q&A: a question and the exact answer you want given. Useful for questions you get every day, and for anything your documents explain badly.
Notion and Google Docs are marked Soon. Until they arrive, save the page or document as a PDF or Markdown file and add it under Files.
Can I crawl only part of my website?
Yes. List paths under Include paths or Exclude paths, up to 20 of each. For example, /help/* takes every page under /help, since * stands for anything. When your site changes, add the page again to update it. Pages that have not changed cost nothing to add again.
How much knowledge can I add?
Across all of an account's chatbots: 10 MB on Free, 500 MB on Pro and 1,000 MB on Business. One file can be up to 10 MB on Free, 25 MB on Pro and 50 MB on Business. Pasted text or a Q&A answer can be up to 100,000 characters on Free and 200,000 on Pro and Business. For scale, a 40-page help centre is well under a megabyte of text.
Does adding knowledge cost credits?
A little: adding knowledge costs $0.02 per million tokens of text, so a 40-page help centre of about 50,000 tokens costs about one credit, a tenth of a cent.
How are my sources split?
The standard way of cutting sources into passages works well for help pages and short articles, so most people never change it. For long or unusual documents, such as contracts, books or product manuals, open Change on How sources are split, then Need help?, describe your documents, and press Set it up for me: ChatFrom picks the settings. Sources added before keep their old passages until you cut them again, which the card offers with one click.
Is my knowledge kept private?
Each chatbot's knowledge is kept apart and answers only that chatbot. You can delete a source, or the whole chatbot with everything it knows, at any time. Nothing you add is used to train any model of ChatFrom's.
What if a source contains instructions to the AI?
If a source contains text that reads like instructions to an AI, such as "ignore your instructions" or hidden characters, the Knowledge page warns you and shows what it found. The chatbot reads sources as information, never as orders. If you did not write that text, remove the source or fix the page it came from.
How do I get good answers from my knowledge?
- Start with the pages behind your 20 most common questions.
- State prices, hours and policies plainly, in one place.
- Remove what is out of date; an old price list means old prices in answers.
- Write a Q&A entry for anything your pages explain badly.
- When an answer is wrong, look at its source: the page may be out of date, two pages may disagree, or the answer may not be written down anywhere.