WhatsApp and artificial intelligence
Knowledge base
A knowledge base is the organised body of information an AI assistant draws its answers from: in a residence, the house rules, the timetables, the services and the frequently asked questions. When the model looks it up before answering, the technique is called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
Also known asKB · residence handbook · RAG · base de conocimiento
How it is used in a residence
In a residence it hardly ever starts from scratch: it is spread across the internal regulations, the reception timetable sheet, the September welcome email and whatever the porter knows by heart. Bringing it together in one place is half the work of setting up an AI assistant. The other half is keeping it up to date: the summer timetable, the new laundry contractor, the new visiting rule.
The technique that connects it to the model is retrieval-augmented generation: before answering, the passages related to the question are looked up and the language model writes from them. That way it uses the residence's own, current information that was not in its training, and hallucinations go down, although they do not go away: the model can still misread what it has retrieved.
Worth knowing
What people take for granted: that uploading the house rules is enough. The rules say what is allowed, but not what time the office opens in August or what to do if you lose your room card. A useful knowledge base is completed with real questions: what people ask and the assistant could not answer is exactly what it is missing.
Sources
Related terms
- AI assistantAn AI assistant is a program that holds a conversation in natural language and, with a language model behind it, understands what it is told even without keywords. In a residence it handles the messaging channel: it answers what is in the house rules, takes requests and passes the rest to a person.
- HallucinationA hallucination, in artificial intelligence, is an answer a model gives with confidence but that rests on no data at all: a timetable that does not exist, a made-up rule, a service the residence does not offer. It sounds just as convincing as a correct answer.