#Knowledge Base

#What it is

A knowledge base is a collection of your own content: FAQs, price lists, policies, product details. It is the only thing the AI is allowed to answer from.

You can have several knowledge bases. An assistant picks one of them, and each channel uses an assistant, so a knowledge base reaches your customers through the channels that use it.

#The problem it solves

A normal AI chatbot answers from everything it has ever read on the internet. That makes it sound confident even when it is wrong. It may invent a price, a delivery time or a refund rule that is not yours.

A knowledge base fixes this:

• Answers come from your content only. The AI is told to use what it finds in your knowledge base and nothing else.
• No answer means no guess. If your content does not cover the question, the AI says it does not have enough information, and a person can take over.
• You stay in control. To change what the AI says, you change the document. You do not need to "train" anything.

#How it works

In simple terms, Threadline turns your documents into something it can search by meaning, not just by matching words.

1. You add a document. A file, some pasted text, a web page, a photo or a data table.
2. Threadline reads the text. It pulls the plain text out of the file or page.
3. It cuts the text into chunks. A chunk is a short passage, about a few paragraphs long. Neighbouring chunks overlap a little, so a sentence at the edge is not cut off from its context.
4. Each chunk gets an embedding. An embedding is a list of numbers that represents the meaning of the chunk. Two passages about the same topic get similar numbers, even if they use different words.
5. A customer asks a question. Threadline turns the question into numbers in the same way, and finds the chunks whose meaning is closest.
6. The AI writes the answer. It is given those chunks and the question, and told to answer only from them.

This is why a customer who asks "how long till I get my money back?" can be answered from a document that says "Refunds are processed within 5 business days", although the words are different.

#1. Creating a knowledge base

1. Go to Knowledge and click New knowledge base.
2. Give it a name, for example "Support FAQ".
3. Add a description if you like. This is a note for your team.
4. Save.

The list shows each knowledge base with the channels connected to it, and how many documents and chunks it holds.

#2. Adding content

Open a knowledge base. At the top, under Add knowledge, there are seven tiles. Each shows a hint so you can pick the right one.

Way	Use it for	Limits
Upload a file	PDF, Word (.docx), text (.txt) or Markdown (.md) files.	20 MB per file, up to 20 files at a time.
Paste text	A short FAQ, a policy, a note.	About 20,000 characters per paste (roughly 8 to 10 chunks). For more, paste it in parts or upload a file.
Questions and answers	Pairs of a question and its answer, kept together.	Up to 100 pairs at a time.
Add a URL	One public web page. Threadline fetches the page and keeps its text.	20 MB of fetched content.
Add from a sitemap	Many pages of your website at once.	Up to 50 pages per import.
Add a photo	A product, a menu, a sign.	JPG, PNG or WebP, up to 20 MB. A caption is required.
Import a table	Rows from a database export, such as a product list.	A JSON file.

#About questions and answers

What it is. A form for FAQs where you type each question and its answer separately.

The problem it solves. In a long document, a question and its answer can end up in different pieces, so the AI finds one without the other. Here each pair is saved as one piece ("Question: … Answer: …"), so when a customer's question matches, the right answer comes with it.

How to use it. Click Questions and answers, give the set a name, then fill in Question 1 and its answer. Use Add another for more (up to 100). Click Save N question(s). Each pair can be edited later like any other chunk.

#About adding a whole website (sitemap)

What it is. A way to add many pages of your website without pasting each address.

The problem it solves. Your help centre may have hundreds of pages. Adding them one at a time would take days.

How to use it.

1. Click Add from a sitemap and enter your sitemap address, usually https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml.
2. Click Find pages. Threadline lists the pages it found (up to 500 are shown).
3. Tick the pages you want. Pages you already added are marked. You can import up to 50 at a time; repeat for more.
4. Click add. Each page becomes a document and is read in the background.

Safety rules: only pages from the sitemap's own website are listed; pages that your site's robots.txt asks bots to avoid are left out (the page tells you how many); a sitemap larger than 5 MB is refused; and addresses that point inside a private network are refused.

#About photos

A photo needs a caption that describes it, for example "A blue polo t-shirt, $4.99". The AI finds the photo through its caption. When a customer asks about that item, the AI can send the photo with its answer, on channels that allow it.

#About tables

Import a table takes a JSON export of a database table. Each row becomes searchable content. If the file holds several tables, Threadline lists them so you can tick the ones you want. Importing several tables at once needs a plan that includes Multi-Table Import.

#About PDFs

A PDF needs real, selectable text. A scanned page is only a picture of text, and it fails with "no extractable text found". Run it through OCR first, or export the document again as text.

#3. Watching a document get processed

After you add a document, its Status changes on its own:

• Pending: waiting its turn.
• Processing: being read, cut into chunks and embedded.
• Ready: the AI can now answer from it.
• Failed: something went wrong. The reason is shown.

Processing runs in the background. A large document can take a few minutes. You can leave the page.

#4. Looking at and editing chunks

Click a document to see its chunks. Each row shows the text, its size in tokens, and whether it is Embedded or still Pending.

• Edit changes the chunk's text. Use this to fix one wrong fact, such as an old price, without uploading the whole document again.
• Re-embed makes the chunk searchable again after a change.
• Delete removes one chunk.

Only the chunk you changed is processed again. The rest of the document is left alone, which saves time and AI cost.

To replace a whole document with a newer version, use Re-upload in the document's menu.

#5. Writing content that answers well

How you write matters more than how much you upload.

• Write the way you would explain it. Short, direct sentences work best. "Refunds are processed within 5 business days after we receive the item" is better than a long paragraph about your refund philosophy.
• One topic per paragraph. Mixing three policies in one long paragraph weakens all three.
• Use the words your customers use. If customers say "shipping", write "shipping", not only "dispatch logistics".
• Include the question. An FAQ written as "Q: Do you deliver on Sundays? A: No, Monday to Saturday" is easy for the AI to match.
• Keep it current. Remove or fix old prices and policies. The AI will repeat whatever is there.
• Split by knowledge base when you have separate brands. Each assistant uses one knowledge base, so this keeps answers from mixing.

#6. Checking and improving answers

• Use the Playground to ask questions before customers do. It shows which chunks the AI used.
• In the Inbox, every AI reply has a Sources button showing where the answer came from.
• Wrong answers that your team marks with a thumbs-down are collected in Answer Review, where you can fix their source.

#Good to know

• Frozen knowledge bases. A knowledge base marked Frozen cannot take new content, because the AI key it depends on is missing. Its existing content still answers questions as usual. Ask the Owner to add the key under Settings → AI Providers, or put new content in a new knowledge base.
• Plan limits. Your plan may limit how many knowledge bases you can have.
• Deleting a knowledge base removes every document and chunk in it. This cannot be undone.
• Both Admins and Agents can open the Knowledge base.

#Common questions

The AI says it does not have enough information, but the answer is in my document. Ask the same question in the Playground and look at the chunks it found. Usually the content uses different words from the customer, or the answer is buried in a long paragraph. Rewrite that part more directly.

Do I need to do anything after editing a document? No. Changed content is processed again automatically.

Can the AI answer from the internet? No. It answers only from the knowledge base of the channel's assistant.

A document is stuck on Processing. See Troubleshooting.