Allowing your Agent to search the Knowledge Base

If you've used Voiceflow before, you're probably familiar with the Knowledge Base. The Knowledge Base can contain structured or non-structured data, such as FAQs, products, and more.

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Giving your Agent access to your Knowledge Base

While traditionally, accessing the Knowledge Base required using the KB Search and Prompt steps, the Agent step dramatically simplifies the process of searching in the Knowledge Base.

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To allow your Agent to search a project's Knowledge Base, simply enable the Access to knowledge base setting.

Yep, it really is that easy.

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Setting an LLM description

When you enable knowledge base access, you'll have the option to set an LLM description. The default description is this:

• "Trigger the knowledge base when you don't know the answer to a question."

If you're storing a different type of data in the Knowledge Base, you might want to change this description. For example, if you're storing product data in the Knowledge Base, you could set the LLM description to this:

• "Trigger the knowledge base when the user asks for a product recommendation or information about a product"

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Optimizing your instructions

One thing to consider when building with the Agent step is that by default, your Agent will use knowledge from both the LLM and your Knowledge Base. If you're creating a support agent, you might want to add a line to your Agent's description to specifically call out that it should only use information from the Knowledge Base. For example:

• "If asked a question, ALWAYS query the knowledge base for an answer. DO NOT make up answers and DO NOT use your own knowledge to answer questions."

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Heads up!

While querying the Knowledge Base from inside an Agent is a great choice for many use-cases, some people might want more control over how a query is constructed and how data is retrieved. In these circumstances, using the KB Search and Prompt steps remains a good choice.

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Luckily, you're not forced to use one or the other - while the Agent step gives you power, it doesn't remove flexibility. We'll talk more about that in the next lesson.