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RAG chatbots that answer from your documents and show the source

An assistant that answers from your own files, cites each source and admits gaps.

3D render of a phone sending chat bubbles into a three lane CRM pipeline board

At a glance

RAG chatbots
Sources
PDF, Word, Excel, Google Docs and Drive, Notion, Confluence, web pages, scanned files through OCR, database tables
Search
Vector search plus keyword search, combined and re ranked
Storage
PostgreSQL with pgvector, Qdrant, or a store you already run
Models
Hosted APIs (Claude, GPT, Gemini) or open-weight models on your own hardware
Channels
Website widget, internal web app, WhatsApp, Slack, Microsoft Teams
Access control
Answers filtered by the user's permissions before the model sees any text

What a RAG chatbot does

The system finds the relevant passages in your documents and answers only from them, with links. Changed files need re-indexing, not retraining.

Read more about What a RAG chatbot does

A general model like ChatGPT knows a lot about the world and nothing about your price list, your leave policy or the warranty terms you changed last month. A RAG chatbot fixes that without retraining the model.

Retrieval augmented generation works in two steps. First, every document is split into passages and indexed. When someone asks a question, the system searches that index and pulls the handful of passages most likely to hold the answer. Second, the model is given the question plus those passages and told to answer only from them, quoting where each fact came from.

The result is an assistant that a new hire, a customer or a field engineer can ask in plain language (English, Tamil, Hindi or a mix) and get an answer with a link to the exact page in the source document. When the documents change, you re index them. Nothing needs retraining.

A RAG chatbot answers questions; it does not act on your systems. If you need software that takes actions, read chatbot vs AI agent.

Where it earns its keep

Internal policy and SOP assistant

HR policies and SOPs in one place, so staff stop asking the same people.

Read more about Internal policy and SOP assistant

HR policies, SOPs, process manuals and past circulars in one place. Staff stop asking the same five people the same questions.

Customer support on your website or WhatsApp

Product and returns questions answered from help content, with handover to a person.

Read more about Customer support on your website or WhatsApp

Answers product, shipping and returns questions from your published help content, and hands the chat to a person with the conversation attached when it cannot help. See WhatsApp CRM for the handover side.

Technical and product manuals

Fault codes and torque values answered from the right manual revision, with page numbers.

Read more about Technical and product manuals

Service engineers ask about a fault code or a torque value and get the passage from the right manual revision, with the page number.

Finance and compliance reference

Accounting policies, audit notes and circulars searchable by meaning.

Read more about Finance and compliance reference

Internal accounting policies, past audit notes and circulars, searchable by meaning rather than exact words. Useful for CA firms that keep years of client correspondence.

What separates a useful one from a demo

Most RAG prototypes work on ten clean PDFs and fail on a real shared drive. These are the parts we spend most of the time on.

Parsing real files

Tables, columns and scans parsed with structure intact, using OCR where needed.

Read more about Parsing real files

Tables, two column layouts, scanned pages and slide decks lose their meaning when flattened to plain text. We parse structure where it matters and run OCR on scans, using the pipeline from our document AI work.

Hybrid search

Vector and keyword search combined and re-ranked, so exact codes are not missed.

Read more about Hybrid search

Vector search finds passages with similar meaning. Keyword search finds exact codes, part numbers and section numbers that embeddings often miss. We run both and re rank the combined results.

Permissions before retrieval

Each passage carries its source's access rules, and search is filtered per user.

Read more about Permissions before retrieval

If a junior employee cannot open the board minutes in Drive, the assistant must not quote them. Each passage carries the access rules of its source and the search is filtered by the asking user.

An evaluation set

Every change to chunking, search or prompts scored on 50 to 200 real questions.

Read more about An evaluation set

We write 50 to 200 real questions with known answers together with your team. Every change to chunking, search or prompts is scored against it, so quality is measured rather than guessed.

Saying no

When nothing relevant is found, it says so and offers a contact.

Read more about Saying no

When retrieval finds nothing relevant, the assistant says the documents do not cover it and offers a contact. A confident wrong answer about a refund policy costs more than no answer.

How we build it

Fig. 01 Overhead: messages filed into three pipeline lanes
  1. 01 Inventory the sources

    Where knowledge lives, who owns it, how often it changes and who sees what.

    Read more about Inventory the sources

    List where the knowledge lives, who owns it, how often it changes and who may see what. Decide what is in scope for the first release.

  2. 02 Write the question set

    Real questions from support logs and staff, each with its answer and source.

    Read more about Write the question set

    Collect real questions from support logs, emails and staff, with the correct answer and source for each.

  3. 03 Build the ingestion pipeline

    Files pulled on a schedule, parsed, split with headings and page numbers, then indexed.

    Read more about Build the ingestion pipeline

    Connectors pull files on a schedule or on change, parse them, split them into passages with their headings and page numbers, embed and index them.

  4. 04 Tune retrieval and answers

    Chunk sizes, search weights and prompts adjusted until the question set passes.

    Read more about Tune retrieval and answers

    Adjust chunk sizes, search weights and the answer prompt until the question set passes. Check citations by hand on a sample.

  5. 05 Pilot with one team

    A small group rates every answer, and wrong ones become test questions.

    Read more about Pilot with one team

    Release to a small group with a thumbs up or down on every answer. Wrong answers become new test questions.

  6. 06 Roll out and maintain

    Opened to everyone in scope, with usage reports and a runbook for new sources.

    Read more about Roll out and maintain

    Open it to everyone in scope, add usage and failure reports, and hand over a runbook for adding new sources.

Questions

Do we need to fine-tune a model for this?

Usually not. RAG is the right tool when the problem is knowledge: facts that live in documents and change over time. Fine-tuning is for teaching a model a format, style or narrow task. Many projects need only RAG.

Will our documents be used to train someone else's model?

With the business API terms of the main providers, inputs are not used for training by default, and we configure accounts accordingly. If documents must not leave your premises at all, we run the whole stack on your own servers. See private AI deployment.

How does it handle personal data under the DPDP Act or GDPR?

We keep personal data out of the index where it is not needed, mask it where it is, apply access filters per user, and log who asked what. For UK and EU users the same controls support UK GDPR and GDPR obligations. Your legal team decides the lawful basis; we build the controls.

What happens when a document is updated?

The connector notices the change, removes the old passages and indexes the new version. Answers cite the version they used, so you can see whether a reply came from the current policy.

Can it answer from database records as well as documents?

Yes, but differently. For figures like stock levels or invoice totals we give the assistant a read-only query tool rather than indexing rows as text, so numbers come straight from the database.

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