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Handbook

Knowledge bases

Knowledge bases make your company documents and web pages searchable for the AI. You store your material once, and from then on AI Chat and the agents answer questions from it, with a reference to the passage the answer comes from. Unlike a single analysis in Document chat, a knowledge base stays in place permanently and is available to the whole team.

Best for: making handbooks and policies searchable, providing price lists and product data for the chat, adding your own website as a source of knowledge, and preserving knowledge that otherwise only lives in the heads of individual colleagues.

Before you begin

  • Owners and administrators can always create a knowledge base, upload documents and import web pages; editors and members can only do so with the matching permission, which your administrator grants under Settings → Roles & permissions.
  • With Upload documents you add files and texts to every knowledge base you can read; you can delete or edit documents with Create & manage knowledge bases or as an Editor of that particular knowledge base. Viewers do not add content.
  • Start with one topic, not with the entire archive. "HR" or "Prices 2026" gives more precise answers than "Company documents".

Create a knowledge base

  1. In the sidebar, click Knowledge bases.
  2. Click New knowledge base.
  3. Under Name, enter a name your colleagues will recognize. It appears later in the chat as a choice.
  4. Leave Activate immediately switched on so that the collection is available in the chat right away.
  5. Click Create.

Under Advanced settings you can choose the language of the documents or a different AI model for text recognition if you need to; the default suits most cases.

Upload documents

While the knowledge base is still empty, the Add content button in the drop area leads to all the ways of adding content; as soon as the first documents are there, the same route is available as Add at the top of the page header.

  1. Open the knowledge base.
  2. Drag files into the drop area, or choose Upload files in the menu. With Upload folder you add an entire folder at once instead.
  3. Wait for the processing to finish. The status of each document shows which stage is currently running.

A source only becomes searchable once its document row shows Ready. Afterwards, check that the knowledge base is set to Available in chat under Settings → General, ask a typical question in AI Chat and open the source it cites.

A single file can be at most 20 MB, and by default the whole organization has 2 GB of storage; which formats are accepted is listed in the Reference. If a PDF contains scanned pages, Datenmassiv AI detects this itself and reads them with an image model. The status visibly changes to Recognizing text with AI. If the recognition got something wrong somewhere, open the ⋮ menu at the end of the document row (Actions for …) and choose Edit; your original file stays untouched.

If processing fails, the entry stays visible with the note Error and the cause. Choose Process again to send the same file through processing once more without uploading it again, or Discard to give up the attempt along with the file.

Remove a document again

If a file has ended up in the wrong collection, take it out again there. This is not an edge case: an HR document in a collection the whole team can search is a data protection incident, not a matter of tidiness.

  1. At the end of the document row, open the ⋮ menu (Actions for …).
  2. Choose Delete.
  3. In the Delete document? dialog, confirm with Delete.

To remove several documents at once, use the checkboxes on the left of the list; Select all in the header row takes the whole view. The dialog then states the number (Delete N documents?).

Deleted documents are gone immediately. There is no trash and no way to restore them. You cannot move documents between two knowledge bases: upload the file again in the target collection and remove it here.

To delete an entire knowledge base including its content, use the menu of its tile in the Knowledge bases overview and the Delete knowledge base? dialog. This also applies to a knowledge base with an imported website. If an import or the reloading of a page is currently running, the dialog says so; delete the knowledge base as soon as that process has finished.

Import a website

  1. In the knowledge base, click Add content (or Add) and then Add website.
  2. Enter the Website URL and click Search pages.
  3. Use the checkboxes to choose which of the pages found you really need.
  4. Click Load N pages and check in the preview what has actually arrived. If content is missing, use Load full page to fetch more than just the main text of a single page. If reloading delivers clearly less text than the existing version, for example only a cookie notice, the previous version is kept, and the preview tells you so.
  5. Click Import N pages and wait until the document rows you need show Ready.

Ready for preview only means that the pages have been loaded for selection; they only become searchable after the import, once the document list shows the status Ready. If a single page does not respond, the import therefore does not stop: that page is marked as Error in the preview, while the remaining pages are available for selection as usual. An import job loads at most 100 pages; further limits are listed in the Reference. An imported website does not keep itself up to date: if your site changes, fetch it again with Refresh in the page header. Until the new version of a page has been fully processed, the chat keeps finding the previous one; if refreshing a page fails, it stays in its previous version.

Write a text directly

Some knowledge does not exist in any document, only in two people's heads, such as who covers for whom during vacation.

  1. Click Add content (or Add) and then Write text.
  2. Enter a Title and the Content (Markdown is supported).
  3. Click Save.

You can change texts you wrote yourself at any time through the ⋮ menu and Edit; for uploaded files, the same route shows the recognized text, not the original. Only imported web pages cannot be changed this way. You fetch those again with Refresh.

Use your knowledge in the chat

  1. Open AI Chat.
  2. Next to the input field, open Sources.
  3. Select one or more collections and ask your question in full sentences rather than keywords.

Below the answer you see how many sources were used (Used N sources); a click opens the passage. Only documents that the answer cites with a number such as [1] are listed; if the answer is not in the documents, no source appears. For anything that matters, read the passage instead of trusting the answer alone. You only see the knowledge bases you have been given access to. How that is controlled is described in the next section. Model choice and web search in the chat are described in the AI Chat chapter.

Restrict access

By default, every knowledge base is open to All members of your organization. For HR documents or draft contracts, switch to Restricted instead.

  1. Open the knowledge base → Settings.
  2. In the Access section, choose the Restricted option.
  3. Click Add person and choose the person from the list.
  4. Set the access level: Editor if the person should maintain documents, User if they may only ask questions.

Owners and administrators always have full access, regardless of the mode, and therefore do not appear in this list. If you switch back to All members, all individually granted access is lost.

A knowledge base does not appear in the chat

It is usually one of two reasons: the Available in chat switch under Settings → General is turned off, or the collection is set to Restricted and you have not been given access. In both cases, ask the person who manages the knowledge base to give you access. If the switch is off, the knowledge base no longer answers anywhere: not in AI Chat, nor in agents, workflow searches, the search or embedded chatbots. You can still manage it, the documents are kept, and as soon as you switch it back on, it is available everywhere again. In the workflow editor it appears with the suffix (deactivated), and below the selection you see what that means for the step: a step that uses it as its rulebook stops, a search skips it, and saved content still ends up in it.

Next step

  • AI Chat: ask questions, choose models.
  • Transcription: recordings land automatically in My recordings and Team recordings, two knowledge bases that fill themselves.
  • Reference: roles, file formats and limits in one place.