Knowledge sources
Knowledge sources overview
Train your agent on documents, website pages, free text and Notion so it answers from what your business actually knows.
Sources are what your agent knows. Everything you add — a returns policy PDF, your help centre pages, a written answer about delivery times, a Notion doc — is read, trained on and searched every time a customer asks a question. Your agent then answers from the most relevant passages.
Open Sources in the sidebar to manage them.
Source types
| Type | Best for | Added by |
|---|---|---|
| Documents | Product guides, policies, price lists, manuals | Uploading PDF, DOC, DOCX or TXT files up to 10 MB each |
| Websites | Your public help centre, FAQ and product pages | Adding a page link, or importing a sitemap |
| Free text | Short, precise answers you write yourself | Typing into an editor |
| Notion | Internal docs your team already keeps in Notion | Connecting Notion and syncing the pages you share |
You can mix and match. Most teams start with their website or FAQ and then add free-text answers for anything customers ask that isn't written down anywhere.
How your agent uses sources
- You add a source. OrbitBase reads its text and trains on it. This usually takes a few minutes.
- A customer asks something. The agent searches all your trained sources for the passages that best match the question, looking at the customer's last few messages so short follow-ups like "and for Germany?" still find a match.
- The agent answers from what it finds. How strictly it must stay inside those passages depends on your Knowledge grounding setting in Settings → AI. See AI settings.
If nothing relevant is found, the agent says it doesn't have that information rather than guessing — and, with Strict grounding, offers to pass the customer to a teammate.
Give every source a clear, customer-friendly title. Your agent may mention a source by name when it helps the customer trust or find the answer — "According to our Returns policy…".
The Sources page
Each type has its own page under Sources — Documents, Websites, Free text and Notion — with a searchable list of everything you've added, its size, its status and when it was last updated.
The Sources overview card shows the big picture:
- Sources — how many you have in total.
- Training data — how much of your plan's knowledge storage you've used, and how much is left.
- By type — size and count for each source type.
- Training status — how many are Trained, In progress or Needs attention.
Knowledge storage
Every plan includes a set amount of knowledge storage. A few things to know:
- It's measured on the text we keep, not the file size. A 5 MB PDF full of images might hold only a few kilobytes of text. A file with no readable text uses no storage.
- It's shared by every workspace in your organisation.
- It's checked before anything is added. If a source would take you past your limit, OrbitBase tells you how much is left and doesn't add it. Upgrade your plan or remove a source you no longer need to make room.
See Plans and limits for each plan's storage.
Who can manage sources
Anyone on your team can add sources and start training while your plan is active. Only owners and admins can delete sources or disconnect Notion.
Keeping knowledge current
- Website pages are re-read every 7 days, and Notion is re-synced daily, so your agent doesn't keep quoting outdated content. Unchanged pages aren't retrained.
- Documents and free text stay as you added them until you change them. Upload a new version or edit the text when something changes, and delete what's out of date.