Facts belong in knowledge, not in the agent’s instructions. Your agent treats knowledge as more reliable than instructions: if the two disagree on a price, an hour, an address or a policy, it gives the knowledge answer. A fact typed into the instructions has no source, so you can only fix it by editing the instructions again. See Writing instructions.
Source types
There are four ways to add knowledge, all at the top of the Knowledge page.
If you entered your website while setting up the agent, it’s already in the list as your first source.
Knowledge sources are unlimited on every plan; how much text they hold together is set by your plan (below). To add or remove sources you need the Owner or Admin role.
How much knowledge your plan holds
Each plan holds an amount of searchable text, shared by every agent in the workspace (and, for an agency, by its clients):
It’s counted as the text that gets indexed, not the size of what you upload: a web page counts the text read from it, a file counts the text extracted from it (a 20 MB scanned PDF with little text in it counts very little), and notes and Q&A answers count their words. A typical web page is about 10 KB of text.
The Knowledge page shows how much is used, beside Sources. When it’s full:
- A website stops reading at the allowance and is ready with what fitted, the most useful pages first.
- A file is indexed up to the room left, and says how much of it is searchable.
- A note that doesn’t fit is refused, with how much room is left.
- A help-centre sync skips articles that would go over, and lists them as not read.
- Q&A answers are always accepted. They’re short, and they’re how you fix an answer the agent got wrong.
Website
What the crawl reads, its limits, and its error messages.
Notes & text
Filling the gaps your site leaves.
Files
Supported types and size limits.
How a source is indexed
Whatever you add, Wiredesk turns it into plain text and splits it into short passages of about 1,200 characters each. Each passage overlaps the next a little, so a sentence at a boundary isn’t lost. The passages are then indexed for search by meaning, not by exact keywords. When the agent needs a fact, it searches with a short phrase and gets back the five closest passages. Passages that are only a weak match are dropped. That’s why a short passage that answers a question directly usually beats a long page that mentions it once.- Notes are indexed as soon as you click Add text.
- Websites and files are indexed in the background. The page checks every few seconds, so you don’t need to reload. A small website takes a minute or two; one of thousands of pages, a few hours.
Statuses
Each source in the list is in one of three states.
If a source is still in progress after 30 minutes, Wiredesk treats the job as interrupted and shows an error, such as “indexing was interrupted — remove this source and add it again”. A website or an uploaded file may be retried automatically first, up to three attempts.
The agent’s setup checklist shows the same thing on the agent’s Overview. The Knowledge indexed item reads “Indexing now — a minute or two” while sources are in progress, and “Answering from N sources” once they’re ready.
The Sources list
Below the add buttons is the list of everything the agent has read, newest first. Each row shows the source’s name and its state:- A website shows the address you entered.
- A file shows its file name.
- A note shows “Pasted text”.
- Websites open as a list of the pages that were indexed, grouped by the first part of their path, with each page’s size. You can search the list, sort it by size, and untick pages to leave them out. Show the passages themselves switches to the raw passages. See Keep it current.
- Notes and files open straight to their passages, numbered in order.