Add an external knowledge source to AI Answers

⚠️ Using a Front Knowledge Base as the source for AI Answers provides the most reliable performance. See this article to learn how to easily bring your external knowledge source into a Front Knowledge Base.

After you set up a Front Chat channel, you can connect an external 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 OR French-only content

• Up to 3,000 pages of content per source

  • Front supports a maximum of roughly 3,000 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 will sync all content at or below the URL(s) you provided. We only allow one domain per external source, though you are free to specify multiple specific URL paths under that domain. We’ll crawl and ingest up to 3,000 pages. See this FAQ for specific examples.

• You can choose to sync: 

  • Content under an entire domain: e.g. help.front.com

  • Content at or below a specific path: e.g. if you input URL front.com/blog, we’ll sync everything under that matches the path, such as https://front.com/blog/next-gen-ai-front-chat and https://front.com/blog/customer-experience-platform

  • Content at or below multiple paths under the same domain: e.g. https://front.com/blog/next-gen-ai-front-chat and https://front.com/blog/customer-experience-platform

• We recommend using a URL 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.

• If your help content requires interactivity, these pages are not supported with AI Answers. e.g. Requiring users to click to expand the page or to advance between steps.

Step 1

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

Step 2

Scroll to the AI knowledge source setting. Click External source, then select New external source.

Step 3

In the pop-up, enter the Name and URL for your external knowledge source. Click Add URL to add multiple URLs under the same domain.

If your website contains a large number of pages, we recommend using a URL with a specific path. See this FAQ for more details. This ensures the sync prioritizes content that will increase AI Answers’ ability to resolve visitor requests.

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 external knowledge source to the AI Answers step in your chatbot flow.

If you need to update your knowledge content, you can return to the AI knowledge source setting and click Sync 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.

You can edit or delete your existing knowledge sources by navigating to the AI knowledge source setting, then selecting the gear icon.

Hover over any source and click the three-dot menu to access the Edit or Delete actions.

• Edit: Modify the name and website URLs for your source

• Delete: Remove the source from all Front Chat channels

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 publicly available.

You should keep the website public while using it for AI Answers so the chatbot can link back to where it found the answer. If you revert back to a protected website after syncing, your chat visitors may be navigated to inaccessible pages from your knowledge source.

Yes. Once you add an external 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 3,000 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.

Yes. Navigate to the AI knowledge source setting and click Download CSV to get a full list of URLs ingested.

Pages must meet a minimum content viability threshold to be ingested. If the page has little content or relies heavily on images, it will not be ingested. A rough guideline: pages should have at least 100 words of text.

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 up to 3,000 pages for external knowledge sources .

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) will result in AI Answers syncing all pages on and below that path, when the path URLs match that of the path provided (up to 3,000 pages). Examples:

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

• If the https://help.front.com/en/articles/ page links to other URLs that do not match the path e.g. https://help.front.com/en/123456 is a page that links from https://help.front.com/en/articles/, we will not sync that page.

Example 3: Providing multiple URLs under the same domain

• When specifying multiple URLs under the same domain for syncing, it is redundant to include URLs that are nested within each other. For example, adding both help.front.com/chat and help.front.com/integrations would be unnecessary if one of these URLs is a subset of the other.

See this article for pricing information for AI Answers.