Create a knowledge base and add sources

Create a knowledge base

Open Knowledge bases in the sidebar and click New knowledge base. Everything else happens in the dialog: hover or tap a step to find it on the screen.

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1. 1 Step 1:Name it Enter a Name you will recognise in agents and workflows.
2. 2 Step 2:Say what's in it Optional. What's in it helps agents pick the right knowledge base.
3. 3 Step 3:Add sources now, or later Drop files, or use Web page, Open tabs (extension) or Paste text. You can also add them after creating it.
4. 4 Step 4:Choose who can read it Any model (Cloud OK) or on-device models only (Device only).
5. 5 Step 5:Check the search engine Optional. Open Search engine to see the embedding model it will use: by default all-MiniLM-L6-v2, on this device.
6. 6 Step 6:Click Create The button reads Create and index when you added sources. The knowledge base opens and shows the progress.

Numbered areas in the screenshot: 1. Name; 2. What's in it; 3. Sources: drop files, Web page or Paste text; 4. Who can read it; 5. Search engine; 6. Create.

Read more about the two choices in Privacy.

Check it worked — 

The card shows sources · chunks · size and no longer says Empty. Open Test search and ask a question your documents answer: the passages come back. See Test what gets found.

Add sources

Open a knowledge base and click Add sources (or Add sources on its card).

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1. 1 Step 1:Pick what to add Files, Web pages or Paste text (and Open tabs in the extension). The table below says what each tab takes.
2. 2 Step 2:Add the content Drop or browse for files, type one URL per line, or paste a title and text.
3. 3 Step 3:Adjust the chunking if needed Automatic suits most sources. See Chunking below.
4. 4 Step 4:Click Done Indexing keeps going in the background. Check: each source shows **Added · N chunks** on the **Sources** tab.

Numbered areas in the screenshot: 1. Files, Web pages and Paste text tabs; 2. Drop files or browse; 3. Chunking; 4. Done.

The dialog has four tabs:

Tab	What it adds
Files	Drop or browse for files: PDF, TXT, Markdown, CSV, JSON and HTML. Text is extracted on this device.
Web pages	One URL per line. A bare domain gets https://. Duplicates and invalid entries are reported.
Open tabs	Extension only. Pick tabs, or Select all in a tab group. The text is read from the tab itself, so pages you are signed in to work too.
Paste text	A title and the text.

The dialog header says which model indexes the sources, for example “Indexed on this device with MiniLM. Nothing is uploaded.”

Each source gets its own row with a live status:

• Reading → Embedding · 12 of 40 chunks → Added · 40 chunks.
• Already in this knowledge base and unchanged · skipped, with Re-index anyway.
• An error in plain words, for example “No text found. It looks like a scanned image.”, with Try again. A failed source never stops the others.

Under Chunking you choose how sources are split: Automatic (about 350 tokens per chunk), Small or Large, and whether to Skip sources that haven’t changed (on by default).

You can close the dialog: indexing continues in the background, and the card and the knowledge base page show the progress. Stop cancels a job.

Adding a source that is already there updates it in place instead of adding a copy. If the new version is shorter, its leftover old passages are removed.

The knowledge base page

Click a card to open it. The header shows sources, chunks, size, the model and the privacy badge, with Test search, Add sources and a menu (Edit, Export, Delete). The page has four tabs:

• Sources: every source with its type, title or link, number of chunks, when it was added and its status. Text indexed by a workflow shows as From workflow …; content added before sources were tracked is grouped under Older content. Click a source to open its chunks (number, page, size, with the overlap greyed), Find in this source, and Re-index, Replace file… and Remove source.
• Test search: see Test what gets found.
• Used by: every agent, project, team, chat and workflow that uses it, with links.
• Settings: the On this device only switch and the Search engine. See Re-embed or delete.

In the side panel the page switches to one column, with Add this tab (extension) and More sources.

Related

• Save to a knowledge base from anywhere
• Knowledge bases overview