Configuring the AI assistant
What the assistant answers from, how to review the questions members ask it, and how to improve weak answers.
This article is for the administrators who run an organisation's Portava portal.
The assistant answers members' questions from your portal's published content. You do not train it, script it or feed it documents by hand. You publish, and it knows.
What it draws on
Everything published in your portal is the assistant's knowledge. That includes events, news, resources, and uploaded documents from your files area.
The other side of that is important. Drafts, and things nobody ever wrote down, are invisible to it. An assistant that cannot answer a common question nearly always points to a gap in your library.
Review what members ask
The Assistant section of your admin area shows the questions members are actually asking, including the ones that got no useful answer. Every unanswered question is a resource a member tried to find and could not.
Review the list weekly and publish one answer each time. It is a modest habit that builds up.
Improve weak answers
When an answer is wrong or thin, fix the source rather than the assistant. Update the stale resource, or publish the missing one. Answers cite their sources, so tracing a bad answer to its page takes seconds.
After a burst of publishing or editing, the assistant picks up the changes. Spot-check a few questions yourself to confirm the new content is being found.
Set expectations with members
Members trust the assistant faster when they know what it is. It is a guide to your organisation's published content, with sources shown, rather than a general-purpose chatbot.
The member help articles in this Help Centre explain this. Pointing new members at them saves the first misunderstanding.