Managing Knowledge Bases
Knowledge Bases are one of the most powerful features in Symphona and enable a wide range of AI use cases. By organizing your organization’s information in a Knowledge Base, you are able to enrich SimplyAssistant AI responses with organization-specific context. Every Knowledge Base you create is made up of one or more Knowledge Sources (website content, files, plain text, or API response data).
For Converse Agents, Knowledge Bases are commonly used to enable “Knowledge Centralization”, where you are able to search for answers across your entire Knowledge Base and instantly get useful responses with references.
For Flow Processes, Knowledge Bases are commonly used to enable an enhanced “AI Decision Engine”, where Prompt SimplyAssistant Steps can perform analysis and decision making based on context contained in a Knowledge Base.
Overall, Knowledge Bases enable AI solutions implemented within Symphona to be far more contextually intelligent about your organization’s operations. In this article, you’ll learn how to create and configure Knowledge Bases and Knowledge Sources so you can start using them in Agents and Processes.
Let’s dive in!
Creating Knowledge Base
- Navigate to Settings > General. Click on SimplyAssistant Knowledge Bases to open up the Knowledge Base menu. This is where all your Knowledge Bases are stored.
- To create a Knowledge Base, click Create Knowledge Base on the top right. You can type a name and description for your new Knowledge Base in the General section.
- In the Knowledge Sources section, you can create Knowledge Sources and define values for them. To add a Knowledge Source, click Create Knowledge Source on the top right. Once you’ve set up your Knowledge Source, you can click Create to create the Knowledge Source to exit the menu, or Create and Start Another Source to continue adding Knowledge Sources. Continue reading to learn how to configure different types of Knowledge Sources in greater detail.
- After you have configured all of your Knowledge Sources, click on the Create Knowledge Base button in the top right corner to save your changes and generate the Knowledge Base for use in Agents and Processes. Note that Knowledge Base creation may take several minutes or hours depending on the number and type of Knowledge Sources contained.
Configuring Knowledge Sources
There are currently four types of Knowledge Sources you can add to your Knowledge Bases:
- Websites
- Crawls existing public websites and ingests all of the webpage content and encountered files into the Knowledge Base.
- Text
- Adds plain text information into the Knowledge Base.
- APIs
- Queries REST APIs to import information from other digital systems into the Knowledge Base.
- Files
- Extracts text from files (e.g. PDF, Word) and ingests into the Knowledge Base.
Configuring Website Knowledge Source
To set up a website Knowledge Source, you must configure the following fields:
- URL: The target public website URL.
- Auto-Update Frequency: Whether the Knowledge Source will be automatically updated every specified number of days. Toggling this will open a slider where you can select the number of days between each update.
- Crawl Website: Whether you want website pages under the specified URL to be crawled and included in the source contents (with restrictions on the max crawl depth and number of page pages). Commonly used to add the content from an entire website to a Knowledge Base.
- Crawl Encountered PDF / Text files: Whether you want encountered PDF or text files under the specified URL to be included in the Knowledge Source.
Configuring Text Knowledge Source
To set up a text Knowledge Source, you must configure the following fields:
- Text: The plain text you would like to include as this Knowledge Source.
Configuring API Knowledge Source
To set up an API Knowledge Source, you must configure the following fields:
- API URL: The target API URL. Note that since this API request is only for retrieving information, it is defaulted to the “GET” REST API method.
- API Request Body Parameters: The body parameters required to make the API request.
- API Request Header Parameters: The body parameters required to make the API request.
- Auto-Update Frequency: Whether the Knowledge Source will be automatically updated every specified number of days. Toggling this will open a slider where you can select the number of days between each update.
Configuring File Knowledge Source
To set up a file Knowledge Source, you must configure the following fields:
- File: The file you would like to include as this Knowledge Source (PDF, Excel, and other text-based formats).
