Leilani Documentation Open app
Reference Knowledge Base

Knowledge Base

knowledge-base.md

Open your agent in the console and select Knowledge Base. This panel has two tabs:

  • Documents
  • Jobs

Related pages:

What the Knowledge Base does

Leilani's Knowledge Base gives an agent a searchable store of reference material it can use when callers ask factual questions or when the agent needs background information before answering.

At a high level, the Knowledge Base does three things:

  • stores uploaded documents for an agent
  • lets jobs crawl URI-based content and ingest it as documents
  • exposes both sources through the built-in knowledge_base_search tool during calls

Knowledge Base content is separate from custom Functions. Functions perform actions. The Knowledge Base supplies retrieval context.

How Knowledge Base search behaves

During a call, Leilani can call knowledge_base_search whenever it needs factual grounding or supporting context.

In practice:

  • the caller's question is embedded and matched against stored document chunks
  • search returns up to three of the closest matches
  • each match includes the source document name, media type, matching content chunk, and score
  • uploaded documents and job-created documents are searched together

This means jobs do not create a separate index. They create documents that join the same Knowledge Base.

Documents tab

The Documents tab lists all documents for the agent, including documents created manually and documents created by Jobs.

The Documents table has these columns:

  • Name
  • Media Type
  • Size (MiB)
  • Checksum
  • Created At

Available actions:

  • Create (upload a file)
  • Delete

Uploading a document

Select Create to choose a file from your computer.

Current document upload behavior:

  • the console reads the selected file as text and sends that text to the API
  • the document name is stored in lowercase
  • the uploaded text is split into overlapping chunks and embedded for search
  • documents are unique by name within an agent

Text-based files work best, such as:

  • .md
  • .txt
  • .csv
  • .json
  • .html

Binary formats such as PDF, DOCX, or images are not parsed by this upload path. For website content, use a Job instead.

Document best practices

  • keep each document focused on one topic, policy, or FAQ area
  • use stable, descriptive filenames
  • prefer cleaned reference text over raw exports
  • split very large reference sets into smaller files when possible
  • avoid uploading the same content under multiple names unless you want duplicate retrieval candidates

Jobs tab

The Jobs table has these columns:

  • ID
  • URI
  • Created At
  • Updated At

Available actions:

  • Create
  • Run
  • Edit
  • Delete

Create or edit a Job

A Job stores a fully qualified URI that Leilani can process in the background.

Current job requirements and behavior:

  • URI is required
  • the URI must be fully qualified, such as https://example.com/docs
  • HTTP and HTTPS URIs are currently supported
  • each agent can only have one Job per URI

How Jobs run

When a Job runs, Leilani:

  1. starts at the configured URI
  2. crawls reachable pages from that starting point
  3. respects robots.txt
  4. converts crawled HTML into markdown
  5. stores each crawled page as a document in the Knowledge Base

Job-created documents use:

  • the final page URL as the document name
  • text/markdown as the media type

Before a Job writes new documents, Leilani deletes the documents previously created by that same Job. A rerun is therefore a replace operation, not a merge.

You can run a Job manually from the console with Run.

Leilani also reruns all Knowledge Base Jobs automatically every 24 hours.

Relationship between Jobs and Documents

Jobs do not bypass Documents. They create Documents.

That means:

  • job-created pages appear in the Documents tab
  • deleting a Job also deletes the documents created by that Job
  • deleting a job-created document does not delete the Job itself
  • the next Job run can recreate any deleted job-owned documents

Job best practices

  • use Jobs for public or web-hosted reference content that changes over time
  • start from a narrow documentation section rather than a broad homepage
  • prefer stable help-center or docs URLs over marketing pages
  • expect best results from pages that render as normal HTML without authentication
  • use uploaded Documents for private internal material that is not available by URI

Choosing between Documents and Jobs

Use Documents when the source is curated, internal, or already available as clean text.

Typical examples:

  • internal SOPs
  • pricing notes
  • policy summaries
  • office-specific answers
  • agent scripts or escalation references

Use Jobs when the source lives on a website and should be refreshed automatically.

Typical examples:

  • public help-center articles
  • product documentation
  • knowledge base sections on your own site
  • reference pages that change over time

Many agents should use both:

  • Documents for private or curated material
  • Jobs for public or frequently updated web content

Instruction guidance

Knowledge Base quality depends on both content and prompt design.

In your Instructions, tell the agent when it should:

  • use the Knowledge Base before answering factual questions
  • summarize retrieved content conservatively
  • admit uncertainty when results are weak or missing
  • fall back to web search or another workflow only when appropriate