Understand how Spaces use Knowledge Bases to provide AI responses based on your organization’s documents
Knowledge Base is a powerful capability that allows the within a to access and leverage your organization’s documents when responding to your questions. This feature transforms generic AI responses into contextual, organization-specific answers grounded in your proprietary information.
A Knowledge Base in Omnifact is a curated collection of documents that are accessible to a Space’s AI assistant. It serves as the specialized knowledge foundation for each Space, providing:
A secure storage location for important files relevant to the Space’s purpose or domain.
Source material that enhances the AI assistant’s ability to provide relevant, accurate, and organization-specific information.
A way to leverage your internal documents that aren’t available to general AI systems.
A common information source that all Space members can benefit from through the AI assistant.
Domain-Specific Expertise
Knowledge Base retrieval enables the AI assistant to develop specialized expertise in your unique domain. By accessing your organization’s documents, the AI can:
Information Access and Consistency
The Knowledge Base ensures everyone gets consistent, accurate information:
Secure Information Utilization
Knowledge Base retrieval offers secure access to sensitive information:
When you ask a question in a Space with a Knowledge Base, the AI assistant intelligently processes your and leverages relevant documents to formulate its .
Query Analysis
When you ask a question, the AI assistant analyzes what you’re asking to determine if Knowledge Base documents might contain relevant information.
Document Retrieval
If relevant, the system searches the Knowledge Base to find documents containing information that might help answer your question.
Privacy Protection
Before processing, the Privacy Filter automatically detects and masks any sensitive information in the retrieved documents. When the Privacy Filter is enabled, images are also restricted from being sent to AI models not hosted within the EU.
Information Processing
The AI assistant reads and understands the relevant sections from the documents, extracting the information needed to answer your question.
Response Generation
Using both its general knowledge and the specific information from your Knowledge Base, the AI creates a comprehensive, contextual response.
Knowledge Base retrieval works best with clearly structured documents and specific questions. For optimal results, ask direct questions about information likely to be in your documents.
When your AI assistant is using your Knowledge Base to answer questions, the experience looks noticeably different from regular AI responses. Here’s what to look for:
During retrieval, a progress indicator at the top of the assistant’s answer area shows real-time status updates like “Understanding query” and “Retrieving documents from Knowledge Base.”
When retrieval completes, the progress indicator shows a filled icon with a message indicating how many documents were found, such as “Retrieved 3 documents from Knowledge Base.”
The assistant may perform multiple retrievals during a single response if it needs additional information or if initial results weren’t sufficient, with each attempt showing in the progress indicator.
The AI response often includes specific references to source documents, helping you understand where information originated and providing transparency about knowledge sources.
To get the most from Knowledge Base retrieval, phrase your questions in ways that help the AI assistant find and use the right information.
Be Specific and Direct
Specific questions help the AI pinpoint exactly what information to look for in your Knowledge Base.
Reference Document Types
Mentioning the type of document can help the AI narrow its search to the most relevant files.
Ask for Summaries and Analysis
The AI assistant can digest large documents and extract the most important points.
Request Comparisons
The AI can identify similarities and differences across documents in your Knowledge Base.
Does every Space need a Knowledge Base?
No, Knowledge Bases are optional. Spaces can function effectively without Knowledge Bases for general topic-focused discussions. A Space with well-crafted Space Instructions but no Knowledge Base still provides a specialized AI assistant, just without access to your organization’s documents.
Can the AI assistant understand all file types in the Knowledge Base?
The AI assistant can process common document formats including PDFs, Word documents, Excel files, PowerPoint presentations, text files, and images (PNG, JPG, JPEG, GIF, WebP). The system extracts and indexes the text content from documents and analyzes visual content from images to make them searchable.
How recent is the information from my Knowledge Base?
The AI assistant accesses the current version of documents in your Knowledge Base at the time of your query. When you update documents in the Knowledge Base, the AI will use the new information in subsequent conversations.
Can I ask the AI to prioritize Knowledge Base information?
Yes, you can explicitly instruct the AI to focus on your Knowledge Base by phrasing your question like: “Based only on our Knowledge Base documents, what is our policy on…” or “Referring specifically to our internal documents, how do we…”
Keep your Knowledge Base focused and relevant. Include only documents directly related to the Space’s purpose to improve AI retrieval accuracy.
Maintain current versions of documents in your Knowledge Base to ensure the AI provides the most up-to-date information available.
Name your Knowledge Base documents clearly and descriptively to help with organization and make references in AI responses more meaningful.
Experiment with various question formats to discover what works best for retrieving specific types of information from your Knowledge Base.
To start using Knowledge Base retrieval in your work, you’ll need a Space with documents added to its Knowledge Base. Here’s what to know:
For a more detailed look at how to add and manage documents in a Space’s Knowledge Base, see our page on Managing Knowledge Bases.
Now that you understand Knowledge Base retrieval, you might want to explore: