Knowledge Base (RAG)

A Knowledge Base lets your agents answer questions from your own content — price lists, policies, product guides, FAQ pages — instead of relying only on their written instructions. You upload documents or point Telzino at web pages, the content is indexed, and on every call the agent searches its knowledge base and grounds its answers in the most relevant passages. This technique is known as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Knowledge Bases belong to your organization, not to a single agent. You can create several — for example one per department or product line — and assign each agent the one it should answer from. Multiple agents can share the same Knowledge Base, so you maintain the content once.

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Managing Knowledge Bases

Open the Knowledge Base manager with the Knowledgebase button on your agents list — available in both the Connect app and the Dashboard. From the manager you can:

• Create a new Knowledge Base (each needs a unique name within your organization).
• Rename or delete an existing one. Deleting a Knowledge Base permanently removes all of its sources and indexed content.
• Open a Knowledge Base to manage its sources.

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Adding Knowledge Sources

Select a Knowledge Base in the manager to add and manage its sources. You can add two kinds: If you add a file or URL that already exists in that Knowledge Base, Telzino detects the duplicate and offers to re-index the existing source instead of creating a second copy.

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How Indexing Works

When you add a source, it goes through an automated ingestion pipeline: Each source in the list shows its current status (queued, processing, complete, or failed) along with chunk-level progress while indexing. If a document changes, use Re-ingest to refresh it; deleting a source removes its content from the index. Because agents reference the Knowledge Base itself, changes take effect for every agent assigned to it — no per-agent updates needed.

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Assigning a Knowledge Base to an Agent

In the agent editor, pick the agent’s Knowledge Base from the Knowledge Base dropdown and turn on Enable RAG (live vector search on every call). Both are required: until a Knowledge Base is selected, RAG stays inactive even with the toggle on. Each agent answers from exactly one Knowledge Base, and any number of agents can share the same one. Selecting None detaches the agent without affecting the Knowledge Base or other agents using it.

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Using the Knowledge Base on Calls

Once an agent has a Knowledge Base assigned and RAG enabled:

• On each caller turn, the agent searches the knowledge base and feeds the most relevant passages into its answer — the caller just hears a natural response.
• If a lookup takes a moment, the agent covers the pause naturally (for example, “One moment, let me check that for you.”) instead of leaving dead air.
• If nothing relevant is found, the agent says so rather than guessing — by default: “I don’t have that information, but I can connect you with someone who can help.”

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Rewrite query before retrieval

An optional per-agent toggle. When on, the agent first rewrites the caller’s transcribed speech into a clean search query before searching. This improves results on conversational or garbled audio, at the cost of roughly 200–300 ms of extra latency per turn. Leave it off unless you notice retrieval missing obvious answers.

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Best Practices

• Prefer focused documents — a concise FAQ or price sheet retrieves better than a 200-page manual with three relevant paragraphs.
• Keep sources current — re-ingest documents after meaningful changes; the agent only knows what’s in the index.
• Pair with instructions — use Instructions for behavior and tone, and the Knowledge Base for facts. Don’t paste large reference content into instructions.
• Test with real questions — call your agent and ask questions the way customers would, then adjust your content where answers fall short.