Build a knowledge base that makes the AI smarter
Your knowledge base does double duty in AcornReply. It's the public help center your customers can browse — and it's the source the AI draws on to draft replies. Investing in it is the single biggest thing you can do to make the AI more useful. Manage it all under Settings → Knowledge.
Two kinds of entry
- FAQs are short answers to common questions, written in simple formatting. Great for "What's your refund window?" or "Do you ship internationally?"
- Articles are longer, richer pages with headings, lists, images, tables, and even embedded video. Use them for guides, walkthroughs, and anything that needs steps or context. See Writing a great help article.
Both feed the AI, and both can appear in your public help center.
Publishing is what makes it count
Every entry is either published or not — and only published entries are used to ground AI drafts or shown to customers. That gives you a safe place to work: draft privately, review, and publish when you're ready. Unpublishing an entry immediately removes it from both the help center and the AI's knowledge.
Organize with categories
Group related entries into categories so your help center has real navigation and customers can find their way around. See Organizing your help center with categories.
Already have content? Import it
You don't have to start from a blank page:
- CSV import — upload a spreadsheet of existing questions and answers, mapping your columns to fields.
- Crisp import — bring over an existing Crisp help center directly.
Imports run in the background with a progress bar, so you can keep working. See Importing your existing content.
What makes a good entry
The AI drafts better replies when your entries are clear and self-contained:
- One topic per entry. Don't bundle unrelated answers together.
- Write the answer, not a teaser. State the actual policy, steps, or facts — that's what the AI quotes from.
- Keep it current. Out-of-date entries produce out-of-date drafts. When you spot a stale answer while editing a reply, you can fix the source on the spot.
- Mind the gaps. Your analytics will tell you which questions keep reaching a human — those are your next articles. See Turn your analytics into a better knowledge base.
Let an AI agent help you build it
AcornReply exposes your knowledge base over MCP and a REST API (see Settings → MCP & API), so you can connect an AI coding agent to draft, edit, and organize entries for you — a fast way to stand up a full help center from your existing docs. In fact, this article was created that way. See Connect an AI agent to your knowledge base (MCP & API).