Add documents and site pages
The assistant answers only from what you add on Answer Desk > Knowledge: files you upload and pages imported from your own site. If something is not there, it says it does not know.
Upload files
- Go to Answer Desk > Knowledge.
- In the Upload documents card, click the file button and select one or more files.
- Click Upload and read.
- You see a message such as 3 documents read. If a file could not be read, the message says which one and why.
| Extension | What it is |
|---|---|
| .txt | Plain text |
| .md | Markdown |
| .csv | A table, for example questions and answers or a price list |
| .html, .htm | A saved web page |
| .json | JSON data |
| .docx | Word document |
| PDF, only when the text is real text and not a scan |
The files are also saved in your WordPress media library.
Scanned PDFs cannot be read. A scan is a picture of a page, with no letters inside. The plugin tells you which file this happened to instead of adding an empty document. Run the file through an OCR tool first, or copy the text into a .txt file and upload that.
Import pages from your site
- In the Import from this site card, tick the kinds of content you want (for example Pages, Posts, Products). Each shows how many are published.
- Click Import.
- You see a message such as 12 pages imported. Build the index to make them searchable by meaning.
Pages are read as a visitor sees them, so text produced by shortcodes and page builders is included. Only published content is imported.
- When you edit a page that was already imported, its text here is updated automatically. The index is then marked as out of date: build it again so the new text is found by meaning (see Build the index).
- New pages are not imported on their own. Press Import again when you want them.
The free limit: 5 documents
Every uploaded file and every imported page is one document. The free version uses the first 5 documents (the oldest ones) in its answers. Documents beyond that stay in the list with the note Beyond the free limit: kept, indexed, but not used in answers until a licence is active. With a licence or the trial, all of them are used.
In the free version, import only a few key pages, or combine your most useful information into a few files. Small and specific works best: one page about returns is worth more than a hundred page manual.
The document list
The Documents table shows each document, where it came from (This site or Upload), how many chunks (short pieces of text) it was split into, and its state: Read, Waiting or Could not read. Click Remove to delete a document and everything indexed from it.
Tips for good answers
- A CSV of questions and answers works very well: each row becomes a sentence with the column names in front of the values.
- Use real headings in your documents. The plugin splits text at headings, so each extract keeps its title.
- Look at Conversations for questions the assistant could not answer: each one is a document you have not written yet.
After adding documents, build the index.
Write to us and tell us which plugin, what you tried and what you see. We answer from Italy, usually within one working day.