Knowledge Base Administration

Organize, preview, and control knowledge bases to improve AI responses.

Pingstreams offers a powerful Information Retrieval module – the Knowledge Base – purpose-built to deliver accurate, context-aware responses based on your organization’s knowledge.

It is powered by a native RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) architecture, combining the capabilities of large language models with your company’s content to deliver relevant and contextual responses.

With a no-code management interface, you can add, update, and organize your knowledge sources directly in Pingstreams with zero-coding.

Technology

When an AI Assistant needs to answer a question, it uses Pingstreams’s hybrid fulltext-semantic search engine to find the most relevant information:

• Fulltext search: finds exact matches of words and phrases in your documents.
• Semantic search: understands the meaning behind the question, even if different words are used compared to the documents.
• Hybrid mode: combines both approaches to return results that are both precise and semantically relevant. (For more details, see our Hybrid search article.)

The AI then generates an answer using this content, ensuring it is consistent with your company’s information and using by default the same language the user adopted for the question.

To effectively use the Knowledge base in your automations you must use the Ask Knowledge Base Action block in you AI flows.

For more details see the How the Knowledge Base works article.

Create a new Knowledge Base

With Pingstreams you can create multiple Knowledge Bases in your project. This is useful in many cases:

• If you need to create AI Assistants responding on different domains such as different products, different support departments (e.g. Support and Sales) etc.
• If you want to create a Knowledge Base chain. For example, first ask the Website, on website fallback ask the official documentation pdfs and on fallback finally ask the self learning knowledge base.
• Other scenarios that will come to mind in the future : )

You can create two kind of Knowledge Bases with different types of indexing/searching, all managed through the Pingstreams UI.

Select the 🧠 icon on the left side menu, you will be redirected on the Default Knowledge Base that Pingstreams automatically creates for you on your projects. If you want a new one, you can press the New Knowledge Base button on the left.

Note

You can’t delete the Default Knowledge Base nor change its type, which only supports Semantic search (Standard, see later)

Choose the Knowledge Base type

Before creating a new Knowledge base, you must provide the name and choose your preferred type

Standard or Hybrid?

The main difference between the two is the following:

• Standard is powered by a classic Semantic Vector indexing. This means that the information retrieval is made using the semantics of the phrases and chunks, not specific keywords. It works very well in the majority of cases, but it doesn’t suit very well when you deal with uncommon words such as acronyms, alphanumeric codes, names, etc.
• Hybrid mixes results coming from a Semantic approach mixed with a full-text based one. To the final result is also applied a re-ranking algorithm that improves the query results. This is a more powerful query engine that provides more flexibility, power and precision on your results.

Populate with your contents

Add a new source

Click + Add and choose the type of content to import:

URLs: enter the address of one or more web pages (one on each line) to index.

With Advanced options, you can fine-tune which parts of the webpage should be indexed, ensuring that your AI agent trains on the most relevant content.

You can read more about Advanced options here.

Sitemap: upload the URL of an XML sitemap to bulk import all its pages. It’s very similar to the URLs importer, except that the first step extracts all the URLs contained in the sitemap you provided as a URL.

Questions & Answers: manually create Q&A cards for quick, specific replies. You can also bulk import your Q&As using a CSV file

PDF or DOCX documents: upload files containing guides, manuals, technical sheets, or other text content.

Configure your Knowledge Base

You can configure and test your Knowledge Base directly from the administration zone using the Configure toolbar buttons as in the following figure

When you press the Preview button, a test popup will allow you to setup the user question and see how the Knowledge base reply based on your contents

You can provide your question in any language, the knowledge base will reply accordingly

As you can see, you can inspect the reply’s info, such as the delay and token consumption, and you can inspect the returned chunks and sources, too.

You can experiment with AI configuration while in test mode. Click on the top right gear of the Preview pop-up and you will see the configuration window. Here you can play with all the options, from LLM model selection to System context, etc.

Knowledge Base Settings

Pressing the gear in the Configure toolbar, you can set the Knowledge base general configuration.

The configuration window has many options:

• AI LLM Model
• Max tokens
• Temperature
• Chunk limit
• System context
• Get content sources
• Hybrid mode (only available for Hybrid Knowledge Bases)
• Re-ranking (only available for Hybrid Knowledge Bases)

You can read more details about each option here: Advanced Knowledge Base: AI Settings

Enjoy building AI agents!