Ask
Stop searching, start asking 
Finally, a proper way to leverage all your team's knowledge and documentation. Enough of endless search results where you don't know where to start.
Table of contents
Table of contents
Stop searching, start asking
💥
What is Ask?
How is Ask different from normal search?
Use Ask from Slack
Tips for writing great questions
How to optimize Ask results
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FAQ
Is Ask available in languages other than English?
How long does it take to index new content?
What content does Ask access?
What if the answer cannot be found?
Is my content used to train or teach AI?
Is any data sent to or processed by a third-party app?
Will Ask produce answers based on answers found in PDFs or embeds pointing to external sources?
Can Ask be enabled on public docs?
Are Guests able to use Ask?
Do I need to use an OpenAI API key?
What is Ask?
Ask accepts questions and then intelligently searches across your workspace documents for answers. It will provide you with a summarized response, as well as a list of documents that it used as sources in its answer.
How is Ask different from normal search?
Ask is able to compare your question to particular content in documents in a much more specific and meaningful way than a normal keyword search. It uses the benefits of language processing and AI to understand your intention, to find relevant passages (even if they don't use the same wording you typed!), and to synthesize that information into a cohesive answer.
Use Ask from Slack
You can directly use Ask from Slack. Slack is the place where most questions are dropped and instead of pinging a colleague, you can ping Slite instead, and have everyone go on with their day with less interruptions.
Tips for writing great questions
Since Ask uses natural language, your results will be much better if you ask exactly what you want to learn, instead of thinking only about keywords. Give clear intention when possible.
Examples:
time-off approval policies?→ "How do I submit time-off requests for approval?"- Explain X feature as If I was 10 years old.
- What is the goal of the marketing team for Q3?
- Can you summarize the product newsletter of April 2023?
- What are the three main advantages of feature X?
How to optimize Ask results
Just like a human, Ask prefers well-organized documents!
To enhance the performance of our AI-powered search feature consider structuring your documents using section headings (H1/H2/H3/H4).
Why is this beneficial?
Incorporating section headings adds valuable semantic context, allowing our AI search engine to better identify and retrieve relevant content. When you submit a query, Ask initially isolates the most pertinent parts of your documents based on the question. By employing headings, you help the engine more effectively pinpoint relevant information, thus increasing the accuracy of the generated answers.
FAQ
Is Ask available in languages other than English?
Yes, Ask works with multiple languages.
- You can ask your question in any language.
- You'll receive answers in the same language as your question (translating whatever information it found to answer your question.)
- You can ask it to answer you in another language.
e.g., Can you tell me in Spanish what is the time off policy?
How long does it take to index new content?
It takes about 10 minutes after the end of the last edit session to index the content added or edited.
What content does Ask access?
The set of documents that Ask can access on behalf of a user is exactly the same as the general search, filtered by user permissions. It will answer only based on the docs you have access to and will not include docs from "My private channel".
Ask uses any written content in your Slite docs, but will not be able to give answers based on content from Questions & Answers or comments.
What if the answer cannot be found?
If Ask has low confidence that your documents contain a relevant answer, it will tell you that it is unable to answer, rather than producing a low-quality response.
Is my content used to train or teach AI?
Your content is not used in any way for the training of Ask's language and AI models. At the end of a question request, there is nothing retained or learned from what it read during processing the answer.
Is any data sent to or processed by a third-party app?
Yes, doc sources are sent to Azure OpenAI to process the answer. You can read more on privacy and data processing in Privacy Policy at Slite .
Will Ask produce answers based on answers found in PDFs or embeds pointing to external sources?
Yes, Ask is able to take into account content from PDFs that are uploaded to Slite. It's also able to incorporate External Sources. You can read more about that here: External Sources .
Can Ask be enabled on public docs?
Yes, you are able to enable Ask on public docs and let your visitors use it as well. To do so, you need to add your own Custom OpenAI key in your Slite settings (subject to OpenAI's privacy practices ), and then make sure to "Enable AI powered search" on the doc level:
Are Guests able to use Ask?
No, Guests cannot use Ask in the workspace.
Do I need to use an OpenAI API key?
While we use Azure OpenAI for Ask, you may want to use an OpenAI API key in the following cases (if so, you will be subject to OpenAI's privacy practices ):
- if you want to enable Ask on public documents (shared with the web)
- if you don't want to worry about hitting the monthly AI quota
- if you have specific privacy requirements (you negotiated something with OpenAI and you prefer to use your own key)
- if you want to enable GPT-4 instead of the default GPT-3.5