Let an agent answer from a collection

Publishing a document makes it findable. Attaching a collection is what makes one particular agent allowed to find it.

Attach#

1. Open the agent and go to its Knowledge tab.
2. Pick the collections this agent may answer from.
3. Save, then Deploy. A saved agent that has not been deployed is still running the previous configuration on live calls.

Attaching is a read. Nothing on this tab changes the collection or its documents, and removing a collection from one agent leaves it untouched for every other agent using it.

Choose deliberately#

Attach the collections that agent should speak about, not every collection you have. A sales agent that can also read the internal escalation policy will eventually quote it to a caller.

If you attach no collection at all but leave lookup switched on, the agent searches everything published in the project. That is occasionally what you want for a single general-purpose agent, and it is rarely what you want once you have more than one.

What the caller experiences#

The agent does not read a document aloud. It finds the passages that answer the question and replies in its own words, in the language of the call. The call record afterwards lists which document and which passage it used, so you can check that the answer came from where you think it did.

The lookup starts while the caller is still finishing their sentence, inside the short pause we hold open anyway in case they have more to say. When it lands in time the agent answers in one step instead of two and the caller waits about a second less. When it does not, the answer arrives the old way: an answer is never delayed to wait for a lookup.

Two things differ between what is read and what is heard. The numbered citations, the [1] you see in chat beside a sentence, are not spoken: a caller has no way to read them. And acronyms your documents write with periods, such as U.S.A., are spoken as a word rather than letter by letter. In both cases your text, the call record and anything sent to your own systems keep exactly what you wrote; only the audio changes.

If a collection is empty#

An attached collection with nothing indexed in it contributes nothing: the agent simply finds no passage there and falls back to its prompt. The Knowledge tab flags this, because it usually means the documents are still drafts.