How to make an internal AI chatbot from your company docs

1. Write down the questions Ara should answer

Start with about ten questions a new hire asks in their first week. Once you know which document holds each answer, you know what to add first.

When someone asks about the company, Ara is instructed to search the documents you added before it answers and to name the document it answered from. When the documents do not hold the answer, it is instructed to say where it looked.

2. What you need

• Add Ara to your Slack. Press Add to Slack, then type /invite @Ara in each channel where people should ask. It never joins a channel on its own.
• You need to be a workspace admin. Only an admin can add or remove the documents Ara reads.
• Gather what you already have: a company deck, a price list, a handbook, policies. Your company website and Notion, Google Drive or Confluence work too.

• How to add Ara to Slack

3. Add your company's documents on the dashboard

1. On the dashboard, open Company and press Add. Pick the one way that matches where your company really keeps things. One is enough to start.
2. Files: PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Hangul (.hwpx) and text, up to 50 MB each. Upload a file with the same name to the same place again and the new version replaces the old one.
3. A website: enter the address and Ara reads the pages that describe the company first, then re-reads the site once a day. Pages that only show their content in a normal browser, such as Instagram or SmartStore, cannot be read this way, so upload that material as a file.
4. An app you use: connect Notion, Google Drive or Confluence and Ara reads it, then reads it again about every hour. It reads through the account of the person who connected it, so if that person leaves the workspace, connect it again as someone who is still there.
5. Nothing written down? Press Ask me instead. Ara asks you up to ten questions, one at a time, and writes the answers down itself. It saves them as facts in its memory, not as documents, and member access settings do not limit facts, so put anything sensitive in a file.

• How Ara answers from Notion pages

4. Check the answers before you tell the team

On Company, switch to the List or Map view, type a question in the search box and press Ask. Ara searches inside the documents and shows a short answer, along with what it answered from. If nothing fits, it tells you it will say it does not know, so add the document that holds the answer.

Admins also get a Questions view. There, list up to 20 questions the company must be able to answer. Ara checks each one against the documents every day and shows how many it found an answer for and the closest document.

That check tells you whether an answer can be found in the documents, not whether it is right. It also only looks in sources every member can use, so a question answered only from a restricted collection shows as not found. Read a few answers yourself with Ask. Ask and Slack both search with the asker's own access, and admins reach every source. To see what a teammate gets, have someone without admin rights ask @Ara in Slack.

5. How the team asks in Slack

1. In a channel Ara was invited to, mention @Ara and ask in plain words. For example: "@Ara how long is the refund window on the annual plan?" The answer comes back in the same thread.
2. A question you would rather not ask in a channel can go to Ara in a DM.
3. Full members of your Slack workspace do not need to sign up. The first time they talk to Ara, they join the Ara workspace as members. Ara tells guests, people from another company's Slack in a shared channel and group DMs that it cannot answer them there.

When the documents do not answer a question, Ara is instructed to log it for admins under Reported by your agents, in the Questions view. The same happens when someone says a passage is wrong or out of date. Fix the original document, then take the item off the list.

If the workspace's own Ara answers in Slack, the company documents are always connected. If another agent answers, turn on Company knowledge base in that agent's profile, or it answers without the documents. An admin turns it on for workspace agents. Even when it is on, a person's own agent searches the documents only when its owner is the one asking.

Ara is an AI, so an answer can be wrong or out of date. For answers about money or contracts, open the original document and check.

6. Decide who gets answers from which documents

At first, every member gets answers from every source. Admins always can.

Put material that only some people should see, such as HR policies or one customer's contracts, in its own collection. Then, in Settings under Members, choose Every source or Only these sources for each person. Ara answers that person only from the sources you allowed.

People set to Only these sources do not see a source you add later until you add it for them there. Everyone who joins later, including people who join by first talking to Ara in Slack, starts on Every source, so check Members after new people join.

Ara searches with the asker's access, but an answer posted in a channel can be read by everyone in it. For material only some people can see, ask them to use a DM.

7. What it costs

Each answer Ara finishes uses credits: usually one, plus a little for any data lookups (Ara pulling information from a paid outside data source). A failed run has no task cost, though the data lookups it made still count. Every answer comes out of the workspace's one credit balance, so the whole team shares it, and when it runs out Ara stops answering until it is topped up.

Every Ara account starts on the Free plan: free credits and no card, so nothing can charge on its own.