Your AI Knowledge Base is the foundation for everything your AI assistant says and does. It gives you full control over the content your AI can access, allowing you to provide fast, accurate, and brand-aligned customer service across chat, voice, email, and agent assist.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to build a high-performing knowledge base from the ground up, keep it up to date, and unlock more advanced tools as you grow. Whether you’re starting with a few pages or setting up something more complex, this guide will walk you through it step by step.
💡 Your AI Knowledge Base can be edited, grown and enhanced at any time so don’t worry too much about getting it perfect and complete on your first try. Often, through testing and previewing you will identify any gaps or improvement opportunities!
🛠️ How to create an AI Knowledge Base [10 minutes]
This section will cover how to build an AI Knowledge Base for your chatbot.
Step 1: AI Knowledge Bases
Head to ‘AI Knowledge Bases’ in the left-hand menu, then click on the blue 'Create AI Knowledge Base' button.
All new accounts will have an AI Knowledge Base pre-built in their account. Check to see if yours exists already and you can edit and enhance it
Adding Data
Step 2: Data Sources
Once your knowledge base has been created, you will want to add some data sources. The knowledge base will use this data to resolve customer queries or to support your agents.
Head over to the ‘Sources’ tab at the top of the page, then click ‘Add Source’.
Here you can select what data source you wish to add. Select ‘Files’, ‘Web Pages’, ‘Add Text Content’ or ‘SharePoint’.
Step 2a: Adding Web Pages
You can add a web page data source in three different ways after selecting the ‘Web Pages’ option:
a. Automatically download all website pages
This is the quickest and easiest method to add website content. Select ‘Automatically download all website pages’ from the selection.
Then add your website URL to the text box and click next.
It will then scan the website and provide a list of all URL’s that it could detect and then add the data from these URL’s into the knowledgebase.
b. Manual sitemap.xml upload
This is the most accurate method to adding web pages to your knowledge base, but it requires a bit more planning to use.
You will need a publicly facing sitemap.xml file that our scraper access (you may need to contact your website team to find this).
Once you have this, select the ‘Sitemap’ option from the list and paste in the URL.
The scraper will then look at the XML file and generate a list of URL’s and add them to the knowledgebase.
c. Manually add pages
This is a more time consuming method of adding URL’s however it is useful if you want to focus your knowledge base on more specific topics or add another URL that might have been missed previously.
To add URL’s, select ‘Manually add pages’. Then paste in a URL, to add more you can select ‘Add another URL’ which will add another text box.
Talkative extracts text content from uploaded files. If your document contains key information embedded in images (like scanned PDFs or infographics), make sure that content is also available as selectable text, or update the document accordingly.
Step 2b: Adding File Data
You can upload files to enrich your Knowledge Base. This is useful for providing internal documentation, detailed processes, or context that may not exist on your public website.
Select the ‘Files’ option when choosing a source type, this will display the upload box.
Click the upload area or drag and drop your file into the box.
Supported formats include PDF, JSON, TXT, and CSV. Files are limited to 20MB per file.
b. Manage uploaded files
Once uploaded, your files will appear in a list. You can remove any file that’s no longer relevant by clicking the trash icon next to it.
Step 2c: Adding Free Text Data
Text content allows you to manually add any standalone text you want the AI to have access to. It’s perfect for: temporary or seasonal updates, notes you haven’t yet formatted into a document, quick additions that need to be searchable by the AI right away.
To add text content, click ‘Add text content’ then past in any text into the textbox.
Step 2d: Connecting to SharePoint
If you have a company SharePoint you can configure the knowledge base to import documents directly.
For more information on how to configure SharePoint, please see the this article:
Chatbot Behaviour
Step 5a: Adding A Custom Prompt
a. Navigate to ‘Behaviour’ Tab
b. Write your prompt instructions
Add clear, specific behaviours you want your AI to follow.
- Think of this as guiding your AI’s personality and behaviour, the clearer you are, the better the results.
- You can include as many instructions as you like to shape how the AI responds.
c. Click ‘Save Changes’
Need help crafting the perfect prompt? Check out our AI Knowledge Base: Custom Prompts guide for best practices, real examples, and tips to shape your AI’s tone and behaviour.
Switching to ‘Prompt Builder’ will delete any prompts you have already written! Be sure to copy and paste your original prompt somewhere else in case you want to revert back to it
Step 5b: Using the Prompt Builder
a. Navigate to ‘Behaviour’ Tab
b. Switch to prompt builder
Click the the three dots and click ‘Switch to prompt builder’ and confirm the change in the pop out window.
c. Fill out the forms
Add clear, specific behaviours you want your AI to follow fore each of the text boxes.
Make sure to set the tone options and response customisations using the tick boxes.
You can also add additional guidance's and additions for to cover off certain scenarios or general chat behaviour.
c. Click ‘Save Changes’
Step 6: Evaluating Your Prompt
Once you have built a prompt, you can run some tests by clicking the ‘Evaluate’ tab on the right hand side.
a. Test Your Prompt
In the text box you can ask your chatbot a question to test the language and formatting of the response.
You can also test out different language models to see which one provides the best responses.
b. AI Evaluation
This is an automatic process that will analyse your prompt and confirm if it is suitable.
It will be looking out for contradictions and completeness in the prompt.
⚠️ Troubleshooting Knowledge Base Errors
Once your AI Knowledge Base finishes processing, you’ll receive an email notification letting you know whether it was successful or if there were any errors. If errors do occur, you’ll also be able to view what percentage failed using the ‘Source Health’ widget on the ‘Overview’ page or by looking at the URL’s in the ‘Sources’ tab. Just click ‘Show only errors’ to see a list of all URL’s that failed.
Here are some common errors and what they mean:
Out of Memory – Knowledge Base Too Large
If your Knowledge Base hits its memory limit during processing, reach out to support to check your licence restrictions. You can also try reducing the number of URLs or removing any particularly large or repetitive pages.
404 – Page Not Found
The page no longer exists or the URL was entered incorrectly. Double-check for typos or make sure the page is still live.
403 – Forbidden URL
The page exists, but it’s restricted. This often means the content is behind a login or permission wall that Talkative can’t access or the page is blocking our scraper tool. Try replacing the link with a public-facing version.
Unknown Error
This usually indicates the website couldn’t be scraped, often because it’s not indexed by Google or Bing or doesn’t allow scraping. Try using a different version of the page, or manually upload the content as a PDF or text file.
⚙️ Maintaining Your Knowledge Base
In order to keep your knowledge base performing well and to further boost its performance, you should regularly maintain it.
a. Overview tab
This is the first tab you will see when you access your knowledge base. It provides useful snippets about your knowledge base’s performance.
It also provides links to more advanced maintenance tools such as AI Suggestions
b. Activity tab
The activity tab provides some insight into the questions your knowledge base is being asked. It provides a list of the most recent questions asked with links to the interaction transcript.
Want to improve your knowledge base further? See the Testing & Maintaining your Talkative AI section.
❓Frequently Asked Questions: Creating Your AI Knowledge Base
How do I know if my Knowledge Base has processed successfully?
You’ll receive an email confirming success or failure. You can also check for errors directly in the URL section by clicking “Show Errors” on any failed entries.
I scanned my website for URLs but some are missing?
Sometimes, your website may block our scraper tool on certain pages. If this happens we recommend uploading your sitemap.xml to ensure all pages are captured
My file upload is erroring: AI Knowledge base Encoding.
Files which are uploaded should be encoded using the UTF8 encoding.
When we refresh a knowledgebase, we generate embeddings from your data for the search tool to use. Embeddings must be valid UTF8 encoded content and will fail if any non-compliant characters are detected.
If you have a UTF8 encoded file and you are receiving an error message indicating there is an encoding error, this will most likely be due to a special character which was pasted into the text document.
When you generate your text files to include in the knowledgebase, you might copy text from word documents and other websites. The encoding of these files may differ and introduce “badly encoded characters”. If a file contains any badly encoded characters, the generation of embeddings will fail, and the knowledge base will not refresh.
To avoid this, you should remove any formatting from any content you paste into a text file. You can do this by using the Ctrl + Shift + V shortcut to paste, which will strip out any formatting. Additionally, iconography like bullet points might cause issues, so please replace these with standard dash characters (-).
An additional method to remove any poorly encoded characters would be to copy the text to the text file, and then open a new blank text file and copying the content to this new text file. The act of doing this will strip out any poorly encoded characters.
How do I change the name of my knowledge base?
Navigate to your knowledge base then navigate to ‘Metadata’. You can change the name under the ‘Knowledge Base Name’ textbox. Click ‘Save Changes’.
How do I change the refresh frequency of the knowledge base?
Navigate to your knowledge base then navigate to ‘Metadata’. You can change the frequency under the ‘Automatically Refresh Knowledge Base’ dropdown. Click ‘Save Changes’.