Understanding AI Assist’s Data Sources
The instructions below are for desktops and laptops only.
AI Assist relies on your data sources to deliver accurate and helpful responses. The quality of the data you provide is crucial; the better it is, the more accurately AI Assist will respond on your behalf.
AI Assist can read multiple sources simultaneously, and grab relevant information based on the context and relevance. If you have multiple AI agents, they share all data sources except Text.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the different types of data sources, and how to leverage them to provide exceptional customer service.
Accessing the data sources
2. Click Automation on the left navigation bar.
3. Click Data Sources in the left submenu.
4. You can provide data sources in the following forms:
FAQs
Plain text
Documents (PDF, CSV, or TXT files)
Tables
Shortcuts
Knowledge Base articles
Websites
How AI Assist uses your data sources
AI Assist looks at your data sources and selects up to 5 chunks of information according to the context of each inquiry.
Each chunk of information can be:
A shortcut (in Shortcuts)
A question-and-answer pair in FAQs
A row in a CSV file in Documents (up to 2,000 characters)
A snippet from Text, a Knowledge Base article, a PDF or TXT file in Documents, or a Website (around 3,300 characters)
Structured results from Tables based on relevant rows, columns, and matching conditions
Once AI Assist has selected the 5 chunks of information, it generates a response according to your Instructions.
We recommend organizing your data sources to avoid duplicate information in multiple sources. This helps AI Assist to access your data effectively, increasing the accuracy of its responses.
Other reference sources are Instructions and API integration, which this article covers further below.
Let’s look at the individual data source types, starting with shortcuts.
Shortcuts
Shortcuts are templated responses to common inquiries. They’re very useful for sending customers files, forms, and suggested messages, tagging chats, and transferring conversations to other agents or teams.
You can enter up to 5 questions containing related keywords within each shortcut. If AI Assist finds matching keywords in these questions, it’ll send the shortcut message to customers and prioritize it in the future.
Each AI agent has its own Reply handling setting for shortcuts. You can manage this setting in your AI agent under Knowledge > Shortcuts to control how shortcut content is used when generating responses.
Choose from the following options:
- Send exactly as written — Uses the shortcut content without changes.
- Adapt only if it conflicts with your Instructions — Keeps the shortcut content unchanged unless updates are needed to follow your AI agent’s Instructions.
- Rewrite in the agent’s voice — Rewrites the shortcut content to match your AI agent’s configured tone and style.
This setting lets you decide whether shortcut responses stay unchanged or are adjusted to align with your AI agent’s Instructions and voice.
To learn more about shortcuts, check out these articles:
Creating and managing shortcuts
Shortcut templates for easy conversations
Using Suggested Message and AI Assist to create scripted chat sequences
FAQs
Upload a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and their responses.
Each FAQ has a question and an answer. To ensure everything shows correctly in the dashboard, use the following limits:
- Question: up to 255 characters
- Answer: up to 1,000 characters
Documents
AI Assist can analyze text files, PDFs, and CSVs for relevant answers to customers’ questions. Ensure your documents contain text that can be copied as this enables AI Assist to read your documents easily.
Click + Add to add new documents and ensure they’re Enabled.
Note:
For CSV files, ensure that
Each row contains 1,000 characters or less.
The first row is treated as a header with column labels.
Each cell contains a text string without line breaks, separated by a comma, instead of a semi-colon.
There are no empty cells in between cells with data.
AI Assist only analyzes the text in your documents. Images won’t be analyzed.
Tables
Examples include:
- Product catalogs
- Pricing information
- SKUs and inventory records
- Service data
- Internal reference information
AI Assist can use table data to:
- Filter and compare values
- Work with date and number ranges
- Sort results
- Match exact keywords and partial text
- Retrieve distinct values across columns
Important:
- Descriptions play an important role in table accuracy.
- The table description helps AI Assist determine when to use a table.
- Column descriptions help AI Assist decide which fields to search, filter, compare, or summarize.
- Clear and descriptive labels improve response accuracy.
To learn more, see this guide:
Adding Tables to AI Assist’s data sources
Knowledge Base
Create articles about your products and services in your Knowledge Base. Detailed articles help to equip AI Assist with the know-how to answer even the most in-depth customer queries.
To learn more about the Knowledge Base, check out these articles:
AI Assist can scrape data from websites containing relevant information about your business. Depending on your AI Assist plan, it can process between 100 and 10,000 pages.
Note:
AI Assist only analyzes the text in the websites you list here. Images, carousels, and other visual elements won’t be analyzed. Some information in tables may not be covered, too. We recommend reviewing ingested pages for accuracy and relevance.
If AI Assist has difficulty crawling your websites, check out these guides:
Why AI Assist’s web crawler might not be able to crawl some sites
How to whitelist tawk.to's AI Assist crawler bot
In addition to the data sources, AI Assist also refers to:
Instructions
API integration
Instructions
Instructions are your personalized guidance for AI Assist. You can provide clear instructions and information to set the ground rules for AI Assist. This helps AI Assist understand your specific needs and priorities.
Your AI agent comes with default instructions, which you can modify anytime. Your changes are effective as soon as you hit Save.
To learn more about Instructions, check out these articles:
Getting started with Instructions
Modifying your AI agent's Instructions
Understanding Instructions
Using Instructions for lead capture
Using Instructions to direct visitors to search result pages
Using Instructions for escalation
Using Instructions to restrict AI Assist's responses
API calls
You can integrate AI Assist with external platforms through API calls, allowing AI Assist to pull data from other systems and formulate relevant responses to your customers.
To learn more about integrating AI Assist with other platforms, check out these articles:
How to set up a custom API integration with Apollo AI
Your data sources in action
AI Assist grabs information from up to 5 relevant sources to answer your customers’ inquiries.
When testing your AI agent using the preview, click the Data Sources icon to see which sources were used for each response.
If you need help fine-tuning your AI agents’ responses, check out this guide:
How to fix incorrect responses delivered by AI Assist
By providing a variety of data sources and prioritizing them strategically, you can empower AI Assist to become a true customer service champion for your business.
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