Add your first knowledge source

Without a knowledge source, your chatbot replies to everything with “I don’t know.” This guide gets one source in — the rest of the Knowledge base section covers every type in detail.

In this guide:

• Pick a source type
• Add a website or upload a document
• Wait for training to complete
• Sanity-check the source

Prerequisites

• A chatbot to train (see Create your first chatbot).
• The URL of a website you control, or a PDF/DOCX/TXT document on your computer.

Step 1: Open the Knowledge base tab

On your chatbot’s detail page, click Knowledge base in the left rail. The list is empty for a new chatbot — that’s expected.

Screenshot: The Knowledge base tab before adding any sources.

Click Add knowledge source.

Step 2: Pick a source type

Hilal Chatbot supports seven source types out of the box:

• Website — auto-crawl and index pages.
• Document — upload PDF, DOCX, or TXT.
• YouTube — extract transcripts from videos.
• Snippet — small editable text blob (e.g., refund policy in 3 lines).
• Article — long-form HTML content you write inline.
• Google Drive — sync a folder of Drive files.
• Notion (New) — sync pages and databases. → Sync Notion

For your first source, start with Website if you have a public knowledge base, or Document if you have a PDF you’d like the bot to know.

Step 3a: Add a website

1. Pick Website.
2. Paste the root URL — for example, https://hilalsoftware.com.
3. Click Add Websites.

Screenshot: The source-type picker on the “Add Website knowledge source” modal.

Hilal Chatbot starts crawling immediately. You’ll see a row appear with status crawling, then training, then completed. A small site (≤ 50 pages) finishes in a minute or two; large sites take longer.

Step 3b: Upload a document

1. Pick Document.
2. Drag a file into the dropzone, or click to browse. PDF, DOCX, TXT, DOC, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, CSV, MD and HTML are supported.
3. Click Upload.

Screenshot: The source-type picker on the “Add Document Knowledge source” modal.

The file uploads, the backend extracts text, and training kicks off. Status flows from processing to completed.

Tip: Your file must contain selectable text. Scanned PDFs (image-only) won’t extract — run them through OCR first.

Step 4: Wait for training

Screenshot: The Knowledge base after knowledge sources trained

Status pills tell you what’s happening:

The list polls automatically — you don’t need to refresh.

Step 5: Sanity-check the source

Once status is completed, click the source row to see what was extracted. For a website, you’ll see the list of indexed URLs. For a document, you’ll see a snippet of extracted text.

If the extraction looks wrong (e.g., a website crawler hit a paywall and got nothing useful), delete the source and try again with a different URL or a manual snippet.

Troubleshooting

• Crawl returned 0 pages. The site likely blocks automated crawlers via robots.txt or returns 403 to non-browser clients. Try a public sub-section, an exported sitemap, or use Document sources instead.
• “Quota exceeded” on upload. Your plan caps total knowledge size. See Quotas & training status for what counts and how to expand.
• Training stuck at pending for over an hour. Refresh; if still stuck, contact support.

What’s next