Adding a Knowledge Base

When to use the Knowledge Base vs the System Prompt, supported file types, URL ingestion, and the common mistakes that lead to wrong answers.

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The Knowledge Base is where you store the documents and URLs your avatar can draw facts from during a conversation. It's the right place for anything factual that changes over time: pricing, product specs, policies, FAQs, training material.

When to use the Knowledge Base vs the System Prompt

Confusing these two is the most common mistake. Quick rule:

System Prompt — who the avatar IS. Personality, tone, role, boundaries. Stable over time.
Knowledge Base — what the avatar KNOWS. Facts, figures, policies, product details. Changes when the business changes.

If you put your pricing in the System Prompt, you have to re-edit the persona every time you change a price. If you put it in a Knowledge Base file and update that one file, every persona attached to it stays current automatically.

What you can add

Files — PDF, DOCX, PPTX, CSV, XLSX, TXT, common image formats. Max 50 MB per file.
Webpage URLs — paste a URL and we'll fetch the page content. Use this for live-updating pages like your pricing page or release notes.
Crawled sites — when you paste a webpage URL, you can toggle "crawl multiple pages" to pull a small site (up to 100 pages by default) instead of a single page. Useful for documentation sites or knowledge wikis.

How attachment works

Documents live in a shared library. You attach as many or as few as you want to each persona. The same document can power multiple personas — a product catalogue feeds both your Sales persona and your Support persona.

Add the document once in the Knowledge Base tab. Wait for status to turn green. Attach it to a persona from the persona form — check the box next to the document name. Test the conversation. Ask the avatar a question only answerable from the doc. If the answer is wrong, the doc may be too long, not specific enough, or formatted in a way that's hard to parse.

What works well in a Knowledge Base

Clear, well-structured documents — bullet lists, tables, headings.
Single-topic files (one file per product line, one per policy area). Easier to update.
Source-of-truth pages that you already keep up-to-date.

What doesn't work as well

Scanned image-only PDFs without searchable text — we extract text, but quality varies.
Single mega-files mixing 12 different topics — the avatar grabs the wrong snippet.
Outdated documents you forgot to remove — the avatar happily quotes them.

Keep a "what's in the Knowledge Base" note next to each persona. When you change a doc, you'll remember which personas need re-testing.

Privacy

Documents you upload are stored privately under your account. Only the file URL is shared with the document-processing engine that extracts the content — nothing else from your account leaves.