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Sources - using training-only mode

There are generally two types of sources in CommandBar:

  1. Sources you would be ok making available to your users explicitly (for example, as a citation or search result)
  2. Sources that can inform AI-generated answers, but shouldn’t be linked to directly

What is the difference between Type 1 and Type 2?​

The more sources the merrier. The more context that Copilot has success to, the better answers it can produce.

A good example of a Type 2 source would be company communities. These often contain valuable information that would be useful for Copilot to have access to, but wouldn’t be appropriate to share with the end user.

Analogy: think of Copilot like a super-powerful support agent that never sleeps. If you were training a human support agent, you could say “these tickets might contain helpful information; feel free to reference them when triaging customer issues”. Same with Copilot, except Copilot can read all of them at once whenever it receives a question and can use the information contained there to include in its answer.

Making a source training-only in CommandBar​

To make a source training only, check Use for training only in your Source settings.

When you designate a source as training-only, the following things happen:

  1. Items from that source won’t show up as search results in HelpHub
  2. Items from that source won’t be available to reference in a Nudge
  3. Copilot answers will never cite any pages from the source as a citation
  4. Copilot will never directly quote any pages from the source (but it will use the information contained there as background)

An example of how training-only content is used in Copilot​

Let’s take an example. Let’s say a user posted a question in your community forum asking how to add seats to their account. It might have looked like this:

“Hey folks — Marvin here from StarvinMarvin.com. My business is taking off and I need to add seats to my account. How do I do that?”

There might be some follow-up posts like: “Gee, congrats Marvin. Seems like you won’t be starvin’ for long!”

As well as an answer like:

“Hey marvin, here’s how you can add seats

  1. Go to your billing page
  2. Click the “user management” tab
  3. Click “add seats”

Now let’s say you add your product community as a source in CommandBar, and specify it as training only. Now a user asks a question like: “How can I add more paid users to my plan?”

Because Copilot has access to this helpful community forum thread, it knows! It’s answer will look like this:

But the user asking the question won’t be linked to this forum post, so they won’t be able to determine where Copilot found the information. “It just knows”.