Handbook

Knowledge Bases

A Knowledge Base is a set of text pages that belongs to the organization. Bots read the pages in their workspace. A bot can also change them, if you allow it. Use a Knowledge Base for what a team knows: policies, product facts, answers to common questions.

A Knowledge Base is for the whole organization. Notes about one person belong in memory.

Create a Knowledge Base

Owners, Admins, and Builders open Knowledge in the Console and choose New Knowledge Base. Enter a name and a description. Bots see both in their instructions. Pick a template:

Template	What it starts with
Empty	Only the instructions.
Company wiki	Instructions and an overview page.
FAQ	Instructions and a page for general questions.

Each Knowledge Base has four tabs: Pages, History, Agent, and Settings.

Pages

Pages are text, mostly Markdown. Create a page with New page: give it a path such as policies/travel.md, the content, and an optional change message. Edit, move, rename, and delete pages from the page view. Use / in a path for folders.

A page can start with a block between --- lines. The keys title, summary, and sources are used in the index. Other keys are kept.

Two files are special:

AGENTS.md holds the instructions of the Knowledge Base. Bots read it first. You can change it, but not delete it.
INDEX.md is generated from the title and summary of every page. Edits to it are replaced.

A Knowledge Base holds 50 MB of text and 1 MB per page.

History

Every change is a revision with a message, an author, and a time. A bot's change shows the bot as the author. History shows what changed in each revision. Choose Revert revision to undo it as a new revision. Choose Restore file to bring back one page as it was. Nothing is lost.

The curator agent

The Agent tab is a chat with the curator. It is a built-in agent that keeps this Knowledge Base in order. Ask it to add, merge, or tidy pages. It can change only this Knowledge Base. Owners, Admins, and Builders use it.

Use a Knowledge Base in a bot

In the bot editor, open Capabilities, Knowledge. Pick the Knowledge Bases the bot uses. A bot can use up to eight. For each one, choose the access:

Read. The bot reads the pages.
Read & write. The bot also changes the pages. The editor warns: "What one user says can reach all users."

A bot can also keep a Knowledge Base current from a folder in OneDrive or SharePoint. See Keep a Knowledge Base current.

In Chat and in the Console test, a source the bot links opens as a page in a side panel. In Slack and Teams the bot names sources by title.

A Knowledge Base needs a workspace. You acknowledge each Knowledge Base when you publish the bot. A running chat checks for changes after the refresh interval, which you set under Settings. The default is one hour.

Settings also holds the name, the description, and Delete Knowledge Base. You cannot delete a Knowledge Base while a bot uses it. Remove it from those bots first.