Do I need a help centre already to use an AI knowledge base?
No. The articles can live anywhere readable — a portal, a docs repository, even internal documents — and the system indexes them the same. What is required is that they exist in writing: if the answer is nowhere, there is nothing to index, and that is the only real prerequisite.
Short answer
No. The articles can live anywhere readable — a portal, a docs repository, even internal documents — and the system indexes them the same. What is required is that they exist in writing: if the answer is nowhere, there is nothing to index, and that is the only real prerequisite.
In detail
Publishing versus indexing
Publishing is having a public portal with search and navigation. Indexing is a system being able to read your articles to answer with them. You can do the second without the first, and to begin with that is usually the sensible order: twenty well-written articles in a shared document already work.
Why you end up publishing anyway
Because it is content that gets indexed by search engines, and a share of any SaaS traffic ends up landing on its help articles. It is the only support investment that also brings customers, so it is worth doing — it is just not a prerequisite.
Private articles
You can have sources only the system uses and that never get published: internal procedures, exception criteria, details you do not want in the open. It is useful and it has to be decided explicitly, because a system mixing internal and public sources without distinguishing them eventually cites something that should not have surfaced.
Terms that come up here
Other questions in this thread
Is a knowledge base the same as a help centre?
Almost. The knowledge base is the content — the articles — and the help centre is the public site where they are published, with its search and navigation. In daily conversation the two are used interchangeably and it rarely matters, except when comparing tools: some sell the first and some the second, and the price is not the same.
Do I need the official WhatsApp Business API to support customers there?
Yes, if you want to handle it with a team or with an automated system. The normal app and WhatsApp Business do not allow tools to be connected in any supported way, and the workarounds that manage it risk having Meta shut the number down. The official API is contracted through an authorised provider, who handles the verification.
What counts as a conversation when you pay per resolution?
A conversation is a whole thread with one customer, not each message: if they write five times about the same thing, it is still one. What varies between vendors is when that thread gets cut and what counts as resolved, and those two definitions decide your invoice far more than the unit price on the website.
Where this question comes from
AI knowledge base →