Knowledge bases

A knowledge base gathers what your ERP does not hold: help articles, procedures, product documentation, contracts. Aidoo splits it, indexes it and can then do two things: find the passages that answer a question, and write an answer that cites its sources.

It is used to answer support tickets, but nothing in it is specific to support: the use is chosen at creation, and everything can be adjusted afterwards.

Create a base

1. Open Knowledge in the Agents mode menu, then Create a base.
2. Choose its use: customer support, product documentation, internal procedures, presales, contracts and legal, or custom use. This choice prefills the settings.
3. Give it a name, adjust the proposed settings, then confirm.

A workspace can have up to 5 bases. Create several when the audiences or the contents have nothing in common; otherwise, a single base with labels is enough.

Labels

Labels classify entries and act as search filters: product, version, topic, department. You choose their names, and for each one:

• allowed values (closed list), or free values;
• whether it is required on every entry.

Example for a multi-product support team: a Product label with your software products as values, and a free Version label. A question asked with Product = Payroll will only search the entries that carry this value.

Feed the base

By hand

In the Entries tab, add a file (PDF, TXT, Markdown or CSV, 20 MB at most), a pasted text or a web address. The entry is indexed in the background; its state goes from "Pending" to "Indexed".

Through a source reread regularly

In the Sources tab, add a site that Aidoo will reread on its own:

Each page becomes an entry. On every reread (every day, every week, every month or on demand):

• a changed page is reindexed;
• an unchanged page is not processed again;
• a page that has disappeared is archived, but only when the site could be reread in full. An empty or incomplete sitemap removes nothing;
• a page published under several addresses (common in help centers) is returned only once by the search. The copies are flagged "Copy" in the Entries tab.

You can limit reading to the addresses that contain a fragment (/fr/articles/), exclude others, cap the number of pages and set labels on every page of the source.

Outdated entries

Each entry gets a revalidation date (12 months by default, adjustable per base). Past that delay, it is flagged "Outdated": it still answers, but an answer that relies on it is never sent automatically. A click on Revalidate pushes the date back.

Try the search

The Search test tab shows the passages the base would return for a question, with the current settings. Two searches are combined:

• closeness of meaning finds a question worded differently from the article;
• exact words find an error code, a reference, a section number.

The Write an answer button goes further: it writes the answer as the API would, and shows the decision taken and the checks passed. This test uses credits.

Measure before tuning

The Evaluation tab keeps you from tuning by guesswork. You enter real questions there, with the entry that must answer them, then you launch a run:

• First: share of questions whose expected entry comes out on top;
• Found: share of questions whose expected entry is among the passages;
• Out of base: for questions with no answer in the base, share where nothing is returned.

The sliders (number of passages, weight of exact words, minimum closeness) apply to the run without being saved: you compare two settings in the table of runs, then you carry the best one over to the Settings tab.

Written answers

When an answer is requested, Aidoo searches the passages, writes from them alone, then checks what it wrote before deciding:

The decision is one of the following five:

• To review before sending: the answer is proposed to a person. This is the default setting.
• Sent automatically: only if you turned it on for the base, all the checks pass, no information is missing and no source is outdated.
• Clarifying questions: the request is too vague to know what is expected; the base proposes up to three specific questions to ask the customer, instead of guessing. A clear request with no answer in the base never triggers them. Can be turned off in the settings.
• Acknowledgement message: the base does not contain the answer; a neutral message acknowledges receipt (yours, if you wrote one in the settings).
• Nothing to send: depending on the setting, the base returns the closest entries, or nothing.

When in doubt, the answer is always proposed to a person rather than sent.

The model that writes the answers is chosen in the base's Advanced settings ("Auto" by default). The model that checks the answer is chosen automatically, from another family than the writer, so that it does not approve its own mistakes.

Credits

Indexing, rereading sources and searching are free. Only writing an answer uses workspace credits, counted once per request and visible in the credit history under Knowledge base answers. A request for which nothing is found costs nothing.

Connect a piece of software

Everything the page does is available through an API: search, written answer, reporting the outcome. This is what lets an Odoo module, or any other software, propose an answer on a ticket. See Knowledge base API.