Knowledge Bases

A knowledge base is a collection of source documents that AI tools draw on to answer questions, generate content, and grade submissions. Knowledge bases power the AI Expert Chat and the AI features of Free Text.

You manage knowledge bases from Knowledge Bases in the workspace sidebar.

Creating a knowledge base

  1. Open Knowledge Bases and create a new one.

  2. Give it a clear name describing its scope (for example “Biology 101 Course Notes”).

  3. Optionally set default chunking settings, which control how documents are split for AI retrieval. The defaults are a good starting point.

Adding sources

A source is a document added to a knowledge base. To add one:

  1. Open the knowledge base and add a source (for example, upload a PDF).

  2. Optionally override the chunking settings for that source — but only before the source has been created in the backend for the first time.

  3. Save. Control returns to the workspace immediately while Blocks finishes processing in the background.

Processing and syncing

After you add a file source, Blocks does some work before the content is searchable:

  • Pre-processing — uploaded files (such as PDFs) are converted into clean Markdown ingest artifacts, stored alongside the original. During PDF pre-processing, obvious plain-text math is conservatively upgraded into MathJax-ready notation.

  • Token estimation — Blocks estimates the size of the content for usage planning.

While a source shows the pre-processing state, you cannot start a source-level or whole knowledge base sync. Once pre-processing clears, sync the source (or the whole knowledge base) to make it available to AI tools.

Note

You can stop an active pre-processing or sync operation. Stopping revokes the background work, removes intermediate artifacts, and restores the source to its last stable state.

Using a knowledge base in a tool

Once a knowledge base is synced, select it when authoring an AI Expert Chat or when enabling AI generation or AI grading on a Free Text assignment.

Plan limits and credits

The number of knowledge bases and sources your workspace may create depends on your subscription plan. AI operations that use a knowledge base consume credits. See Usage Reports to monitor consumption.

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