Ferndesk
Assistant

How AI answers work

The AI assistant answers questions by searching your published knowledge base, finding relevant articles, and generating a response with citations to the source content.

Content scope

AI answers use published documentation, including knowledge-base articles and, where available, published API reference content. Drafts, unpublished changes, and internal notes are not included.

You can enable AI answers without published articles, but the assistant may not answer documentation-based questions until relevant documentation is published.

Answer generation

When a user submits a question, the AI assistant:

  1. Searches the published knowledge base for articles related to the question

  2. Retrieves the most relevant content from matching articles

  3. Synthesizes an answer based on the retrieved content, using your configured answer length (Concise, Standard, or Thorough)

  4. Attaches clickable citations to the source articles

You configure response behavior, including answer length, tone, emoji use, screenshots, standing instructions, and off-limits topics, in Customize the AI assistant.

Media in answers

Article images and walkthrough videos reach the assistant with context: what the media shows, the article section it sits under, and the text it follows. The assistant selects the image or video that matches the question instead of relying on article order.

When the Screenshots setting is on, the assistant can embed up to two article images per answer. When Screenshots is off, answers contain no embedded images.

Walkthrough video links are not affected by the Screenshots switch. See Citations below for when and where they appear.

Citations

AI answers may include clickable citations when relevant source documentation is used. Click a citation to read the full article for more context.

When a cited article contains a tutorial or walkthrough video that covers the question, the AI assistant can also add a single link to watch that video, placed after the written steps. The link comes from the same article used to answer, so it appears only when that video is relevant, not in every answer.

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