Add a knowledge base
Crawl your website or upload business documents so voice agents answer questions about prices, hours, policies, and services accurately.
Add a knowledge base
Give your agent a knowledge base so it answers business-specific questions — prices, opening hours, policies, services, contact details — from your own sources instead of guessing. Crawl a business website or upload PDFs and text; the agent looks up all attached sources during the call.
Time: ~3 minutes
What works well
- Good: fact sheets, FAQs, price lists, service menus, policy pages, location/hours.
- Less useful: scanned image-only PDFs (no extractable text), huge unstructured PDFs, anything that changes hourly.
- Limits: PDF, plain text, or markdown up to 10 MB per file. Website crawls include up to 50 pages and can be run once per business every 24 hours while usage and pricing are monitored.
Steps (client self-serve)
- Open the tenant portal:
https://voice.makeautomation.ai/loginand sign in with your tenant API key. - Go to Knowledge (
/portal/knowledge). - Paste the public business website URL and click Crawl website, or click
Upload document and pick a PDF,
.txt, or.mdfile. - Keep the page open while a website is crawled. Wait for the new source to appear as ready.
- Ask your operator to attach the source to the agent that should use it.
You can upload several documents. Delete any document anytime — it is removed from every agent that used it.
Attaching documents to an agent (operator)
A document is only used once it is attached to an agent:
- In the admin dashboard, open the agent (Agents → agent).
- Scroll to Knowledge base — upload here too if you are setting it up for the client.
- Under Documents this agent uses, tick the documents this agent should search and click Save attached documents.
- The agent picks up the change on its next config sync (~30 seconds).
Get better answers
Knowledge works best with a small prompt tweak so the agent grounds business-specific facts but still answers general questions naturally. See the operator runbook SOP 06 — KB prompt optimization (Admin → Runbooks).
Troubleshooting
| Issue | What to check |
|---|---|
| Upload fails immediately | File over 10 MB, or not PDF/text/markdown |
| Website crawl is unavailable | The previous crawl for this business was less than 24 hours ago, or website crawling is not configured |
| Status shows failed | Scanned/image-only PDF with no text, or storage not configured — contact your operator |
| Agent doesn't use the document | It must be attached to the agent and show status ready |
| Agent gives outdated info | Re-upload the current document, or crawl the website again after 24 hours, then delete the old source |
Related
- Operators: technical reference → Knowledge base (RAG / pgvector) integration doc
- Operators: prompt tuning → SOP 06 — KB prompt optimization