Creating a manual knowledge base

Creating a knowledge base manually gives you full control over its content, ensuring accuracy and relevance. This allows you to create and maintain a customized knowledge base that meets your specific requirements. You can add information in bulk through CSV file uploads or add articles individually. Once established, you can easily add new items and make edits as needed.

Note: In addition to manual creation, there are alternative methods for building a knowledge base, such as utilizing web sync or establishing connections with 3rd party integration.

This article covers:

• How to create a manual knowledge base
• How to manually upload or add articles
• Limitations of a manual knowledge base

Prerequisites for creating a knowledge base manually

• Account owner or admin privileges; or relevant role/privilege
• Basic, Pro, Business, Education, or Enterprise account
• Zoom Virtual Agent license

How to create a manual knowledge base

1. Sign in to the Zoom web portal.
2. In the navigation menu, click AI Management and then Knowledge Base.
3. Click Add Knowledge Base.
4. Select Manual.
5. On the Setup knowledge base page, provide the following information:
   • Knowledge base name: Enter a display name for your knowledge base.
   • Language: Select the language for your knowledge base that you want to add.
   • File upload: Select or drag a CSV, DOCX or PDF file with knowledge base content to be used by any of your chatbots.
     Note: You can download a sample CSV file to show the required formatting or skip the upload to manually add the knowledge content.
6. Click Create.
   You will be directed to the Articles tab where you can see the list of articles and adjust the knowledge base settings in the Settings tab.

How to manually upload or add articles

1. Sign in to the Zoom web portal.
2. In the navigation menu, click AI Management and then Knowledge Base.
3. Select a manual knowledge base.
4. Click Add Content and choose between the following:
   • Upload articles: Add multiple articles by uploading a CSV, DOCX or PDF.
   • Add article: Add a new individual article. Proceed to the next step.
5. Provide the following details:
   • Title: This could be a question that the customer can enter into the chatbot.
   • Content: This could be the answer to the customer's question entered into the chatbot. You can modify and edit the text by using the formatting options available in the text editor.
   • Category (optional): Enter a category which best describes the topic of the article.
   • URL (optional): URL of the article.
   • Article ID (optional): Enter a specific code or number that helps to identify and locate a particular article within a database or publishing platform
6. Click Save.
   You will be directed to the Articles tab where you can manually add articles and adjust the knowledge base settings in the Settings tab.
   

Articles tab

This is where you can access a compilation of articles and perform the following actions:

• Click Add Content to add more articles.
• Use the search bar to find articles based on their title or category.
• Click the article title to open a slideout where you can view details like the Category, URL, Article ID, Tags, and Content of the article. The content is displayed according to the settings customized in the knowledge base. Next to the Content section, you'll find a drop-down menu where you can choose how to handle tables within the article. The options include:
  • Extract table (Keep table structure): This keeps the original table format.
  • Extract table (Convert to plain text): This converts the table into plain text.
  • Do not extract table: This option prevents the table from being extracted.
• Click the Answer Preview button located at the top right to test queries. Enter a query that you think an end user might input into the bot to assess the responses provided by the Knowledge Base model. You can filter the knowledge base by name and language.

Limitations of a manual knowledge base

• Manual knowledge bases are limited to 5000 articles.
• Knowledge base articles cannot exceed 250KB.
• Uploading PDFs, Docx, and basic HTML (bold, link, div, etc) are supported. More advanced HTML like script tags are removed upon save.