How does a file attachment work and how is it different from a Knowledge base?

Understand the difference between direct file attachments and Knowledge bases, including how each processes documents for AI responses.

There are two ways how contents of a file are processed for generating an answer:

• Direct files are previewed in the model context. In chats and Agents with up to 20 total documents, all direct files are previewed. With more than 20 documents, an Agent retrieves documents through document search instead, while spreadsheets remain attached.
• AI models have a context window, which is the limit of how much text can be processed at once. For long documents or a large number of documents, the documents are split into chunks and semantic search retrieves only the most relevant sections, which are then sent to the model in the context window. This is used in Knowledge bases.

Attaching the files directly to an agent or to a chat leads to the best results. If possible, you should follow this option. We recommend to attach as few documents as possible to an agent or chat.

In some use cases, for example when working with large documentation or for an FAQ agent, attaching the documents to an agent or to a chat directly is not possible. Here, you can use Knowledge bases, which work well for use cases where only specific sections are relevant, but not the entire documents.