⚠️ This feature is in open beta. Using a Front Knowledge Base as the source for AI Answers is available as well. See this article to learn how to easily bring your third-party knowledge source into a Front Knowledge Base.

After you set up a Front Chat channel, you can connect a third-party knowledge source for AI Answers in your chatbot. This will allow you to resolve Front Chat inquiries with natural language responses generated by AI based on content outside of Front.

To connect external knowledge sources to Front Chat, you must have the following:

• A Front Chat inbox set up

• A live Front Chat widget

• Access to the AI Answers feature

• English-only content

• Up to 3000 pages of content per source

  • Front supports a maximum of roughly 3000 pages. The maximum may vary as some pages are more costly to sync, causing you to reach the limit. If you run into this please contact us.

• We only support third-party knowledge sources at the domain level today. This means we’ll sync the entire domain rather than the specific pages/paths you provide, up to 3000 pages. See this FAQ for specific examples.

• We recommend using a domain that is a dedicated FAQ, knowledge base or help center website where the content is almost exclusively focused on providing answers to customer questions. Additional irrelevant content may reduce the success rate of AI Answers. 

• If your help content contains links to content on other domains or documents/PDFs, those will not be synced and will not inform AI Answers.

• If your help content contains recommendations to “contact your team” about certain topics, AI Answers will not answer and instead send the customer down the “No get more help” path when a customer asks about those topics. Our goal with AI Answers is to make sure that AI Answers is adding value to your team. Redirecting users to different channels goes against that goal, so we prohibit the bot from responding with such suggestions.

Step 1

Navigate to your Front Chat channel where you want to set up your third-party knowledge source, then click the Automation tab at the top.

Step 2

Scroll to the AI knowledge source setting, then click the dropdown and select New 3rd-party source.

Step 3

In the pop-up, enter the Name and URL for your external knowledge source.

Step 4

Check the box to agree to import terms, then click Add new source to finish. It may take up to 3 hours to complete the sync.

Once the sync has completed, you can add your third-party knowledge source to the AI Answers step in your chatbot flow.

Step 5

If you need to update your knowledge content, you can return to the AI knowledge source setting and click Sync now to manually trigger a re-sync. This will pull updated content into Front after the initial sync. You can trigger the sync once every 24 hours.

• If existing pages are updated in your knowledge source, the new content will sync into Front.

• If new pages have been added to your knowledge source, they will sync into Front as long as you are within your page maximum.

• If pages have been deleted in your knowledge source, they will be removed from Front.

No. To update your content, you must manually trigger a re-sync in the AI knowledge source setting.

No. We can only sync content from publicly available websites. If you want to sync content from a protected website, you will need to make it available publicly while the sync is occurring.

Yes. Once you add a third-party knowledge source to a Front Chat channel, it will be available as an option for all your Front Chat channels.

Front supports a maximum of roughly 3000 pages per source. Depending on the type of website, we may sync less pages as it requires more resources to ingest the content. For example, if your website has bot prevention, we may only be able to sync up to 500 pages.

Not natively in the Front application. However, you can contact us to get a full list of URLs ingested.

We only ingest pages that pass a minimum content viability threshold. If the page has little content or it is using mostly images, we will not be able to ingest that content. If you think you have a valid page that was not synced, please contact us and send us the website URL for the source you are syncing.

AI Answers syncs external knowledge sources by following paths tied to a specific domain. It will sync every page on that domain up to 3,000 pages.

The image below uses https://help.front.com/en/articles/788928 to illustrate what we mean when we refer to a Domain, Path, and Page.

Example 1: If the URL provided is https://help.front.com/, AI Answers will sync every page under the help.front.com domain. Examples:

• https://help.front.com/en/articles/2157 

• https://help.front.com/en/articles/2194

• https://help.front.com/en/articles/2192 

Example 2: Providing a domain with a specific path (e.g. help.front.com/en/articles/2194) will result in AI Answers syncing all pages on that path first, but then also syncing all other pages on that domain (up to 3,000 pages), even if other pages are on different paths. Examples:

• If the URL provided is https://help.front.com/en/articles/2194, AI Answers will sync every page under the domain help.front.com that it can find.

• If the domain provided is www.front.com, AI Answers won’t sync any pages on help.front.com as it is now syncing with a different domain.

See this article for pricing information for AI Answers.