If you want to make the most of Answer, here's a set of best practices and actions you can implement on your platform.
1. Before You Enable Answer
Important: Answer is activated platform-wide; you cannot restrict it to specific spaces or users. All preparation must happen before you toggle the switch.
Browse Documentation
Before embarking on your adventure, we advise you to take a quick look at Answer's documentation. This will give you a better idea of the possibilities.
Prepare the Platform
1) Audit existing content
Retire or update anything outdated to remove noise and stale facts that could pollute answers. You can use the platform Analytics for that and the Content Expiration feature.
Take the opportunity to review the whole platform structure. Are there some spaces that could be deleted or archived entirely?
2) Harvest real queries
Export the top search terms from the last 90 days in Administration ▸ Analytics ▸ Search statistics and turn them into natural-language questions. This gives you a must-cover test set.
For every question on that list, manually verify that an existing note (or file) contains the answer within a single 200-word passage and has a clear, descriptive title. This confirms Answer will have the raw material it needs.
3) Create Summary for popular articles
Ensure that your most popular articles have a clear Summary. That will help Answer to retrieve your articles and answer the questions.
4) Review permissions
Review space permissions. Answer respects existing permissions, so mis-tagged articles can surface confidential info. Correcting permissions beforehand prevents data leakage. Permissions doesn't change between Answer and regular search, but it's a good practice to review them from time to time anyway.
Know What Answer Can & Can’t Do (Yet)
💡 Good to Know: Types of Questions
There are many different types of questions, and Answer currently only answers some of them. So it's useful to know what does and doesn't work yet.
Answer uses up to 5 blocks of text extracted from your knowledge base of around 250 words to answer users' questions. From here, it's easy to understand the current limitations.
Answer will easily respond to a question such as "What is Elium?" if the answer is in your knowledge base (i.e., in one of the blocks extracted by Answer).
However, aggregation questions that require you to gather dozens or hundreds of pieces of information to generate an answer still won't work (example: "Make me a list of all the products that have feature X"), nor will filter or order-type searches (example: "Give me the last 5 articles on topic X").
Note: In our roadmap, we plan to teach Answer to respond to this type of question by enabling it to use "classic" search.
A good starting point is to use the keywords utilized in classic search to generate questions your users might be asking. These are available in the search statistics section of the administration panel.
✍🏻 Note
Please feel free to use the Answer feedback function, even in beta phase. This feedback is fundamental to enable us to improve Answer's search and response algorithm.
Setting Up Integrations
Answer is available in the web application, but not only. Slack is also available. Don't hesitate to activate and test these integrations.
⚠️ Attention
Although we strive to maintain functional parity between the integrations and the functionality on our application, some features may not be available in all integrations.
2. Create Content That Answer Loves
Create atomic articles
Keep each note to one idea. Split giant PDFs into separate notes where possible so retrieval stays precise. Avoid long, unstructured documents with multiple topics.
Content Clarity and Style
Avoid jargon or complex sentence structures. Answer works best with well-defined facts and instructions. Remember, Answer doesn't have your context! E.g., don’t just say “click here”—say “Click the Settings icon in the top-right menu.”
Content Structure
Avoid repeated boilerplate text across documents. Duplication can confuse embedding models and pollute the vector space.
Include keywords naturally. Think like a user: what terms would they search for? Include them. Similar to search engine in the end.
Ensure documents can be split logically (e.g., by headings or sections).
Focus on native content
Overall, native content offers greater flexibility in extracting information, as well as in managing feedback afterward.
Although Answer is based on your Elium content and Word, Excel, or PDF files (and even videos!), native content still provides significant advantages.
Annotations, for example, are only available on native content. The same applies to expiration dates.
✍🏻 Note
If you have a lot of knowledge in files, don't worry. Answer is indeed designed to extract information from files and use it to generate answers.
Create Continuous Text
To generate answers, we supply Answer with content blocks. These blocks are represented as continuous text. For example, a list of bullet points will be reformatted as continuous text.
Counter-intuitively, Answer may find it more difficult to extract information if the document is (visually) over-structured, as might sometimes be the case in PowerPoint or Excel. It's worth reformatting complex content into continuous text.
💡 Hints and Tips: The Importance of Titles
Technically, content is indexed in blocks of around 200 words. Each block is accompanied by the content title at the time of indexing. This means that the title is very important to Answer's ability to find the right content blocks to generate a relevant response.
3. Operate Answer as a Living System
Handling Feedback
Feedback is the basis for improving Answer's ability to respond to users' questions. From the administration panel, you have access to all feedback left by your users.
Each piece of feedback contains a range of information, such as the question asked, Answer's response, and the sources used to answer the question. This information is at your disposal to help you understand why Answer doesn't answer correctly.
For the moment, enhancing Answer's ability to respond depends exclusively on your content. So it's your content that you'll be able to modify to improve Answer's responses.
🎯 Roadmap
In the future, the answers themselves will be used to enhance Answer's capabilities.
We're working on the possibility of posting feedback at the content block level. This will enable contributors to understand which parts of their content need to be improved.
Finally, in the longer term, feedback will be used as the basis for Answer's learning process.
Export and Review All Questions
All the questions asked by your users can be exported from the administration panel. This CSV file contains the same information as the feedback.
The difference with feedback is that you have access to the very questions that users haven't given feedback on. We believe it's vital to review all the questions in order to better understand how Answer is used on the platform by your users.
Things You Need to Know
About Tags
For the moment, tags are not taken into account for answer generation, nor for upstream search. Of course, they remain useful for advanced search.
Videos Are Also Taken Into Account
The videos are transcribed, and the text is used by Answer to generate responses. You can therefore upload your onboarding or training videos, for example.
Expired Content Is Used
Whether your content has expired or not, it will be used as a source to generate a response.
🎯 Roadmap
In the future, contributors will be notified when their expired content has been used as a source by Answer.
Other Resources
Documentation
Documentation is also available in the Help Center, describing each Answer feature in greater detail 👇🏻
For More Technical Information
Technical information on how Answer works is available on our blog. Here's a link to the article: https://elium.com/blog/how-we-gave-superpowers-to-our-search-with-chatgpt/