Sales, solutions and proposal teams constantly tackle questions that need swift, comprehensive answers. Whether it’s a prospect inquiring about a feature comparison with a competitor, a questionnaire in a vendor portal that needs to be filled out, a client checking in on an upcoming product enhancement, or simply details about the platform that an employee of your organization is looking for, collating information from multiple sources and verifying that it is updated and accurate takes up a lot of time and manual effort.
SiftHub’s Answer feature generates accurate, contextual information from your organization’s connected knowledge sources — right within your preferred work environment so you never have to switch tabs to find the answers you seek.
How to use Answer
To leverage SiftHub’s Answer generation feature, you need to add the Browser Extension, log in with your credentials and ensure that your account has some company knowledge either uploaded or connected to it - in the form of uploaded Documents, Q&As, or Connectors
From the 'Answer' icon in the Floating Widget
- Once the extension is added to your browser, the Floating Widget pops up on all your browser tabs with quick actions you can take.
- Highlight text anywhere in the browser containing the question you want answered.
- Click on Answer (pencil icon) from the floating widget. SiftHub detects the query from your highlighted text, retrieves relevant information from your connected knowledge sources and generates a contextual response.
You can view the text you highlighted and the answer being generated in the extension side panel that expands automatically when you click the Answer icon.
From the 'Answer' tab in the Copilot section of the Browser Extension
- Alternatively, click on the SiftHub icon within the Extension section in your browser’s top navigation bar to open the side panel.
Navigate to the Copilot section of the extension. In the Answer tab, enter a query you want answered or paste it directly into the text box, and click “Generate”.
What can SiftHub answer
- SiftHub can answer any query for which your organization has connected its relevant knowledge sources. Common categories of questions revolve around general company information, product and service offerings, security practices and policies implemented, sales and solutions methodologies, and more.
- As with any enterprise AI system, the comprehensiveness of SiftHub’s generated answers relies on having accurate, updated data to formulate reliable responses.
How does Answer Generation work
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Answers only from connected knowledge: SiftHub only scans your connected knowledge sources for information that can answer a query such as Documents, Q&As and connected apps like Google Drive. It strictly restricts the information included in generated answers within the scope of your organization’s connected knowledge sources to avoid hallucinations.
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Crafts answers dynamically: The generated answers are much more than just canned responses fetched from your uploaded RFPs, sales playbooks or Q&A pairs.
SiftHub understands a given question semantically, and then crafts an answer to the question which is assimilated from one of more connected sources depending on the complexity of the question.
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Respects native access permissions: SiftHub adheres to the access configurations defined in your external knowledge sources.
For example, if your organization has connected its Google Drive to SiftHub, and a user who does not have access to a certain file asks a query with relevant information present within that file, SiftHub does not return an answer to that user’s query.
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Adheres to your settings and filters: The scope of connected sources where SiftHub searches for information that can potentially answer a query can be controlled in Generate Settings. Users can direct SiftHub to omit certain sources in the generated answer, or to only formulate responses from a predefined set of sources by creating Collections.
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Generates alternate answers and prioritizes the best: Under the hood, SiftHub has a robust AI pipeline with several components that work together to evaluate the answer versions that can be generated from a set of connected knowledge sources and deliver the most accurate results.
Our answer generation system intelligently evaluates responses using a sophisticated scoring mechanism. Each potential answer is ranked based on its relevance to your query and the freshness of its source material, ensuring you receive the most accurate and up-to-date information available. The system automatically adjusts these scores over time to maintain the quality and timeliness of responses.
Understanding Answer results
SiftHub evaluates the completeness of its generated answer based on how much relevant information is contained in your connected knowledge sources. For each answer you can view the source(s) from which the answer was generated
There are 3 cases of results returned by SiftHub for a user query:
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Complete answer: When the query can be fully answered using connected knowledge sources, SiftHub renders a comprehensive response.
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Partial answer: When the query can only be partially answered using connected knowledge sources, SiftHub indicates this with a flag in the response dialog in browser extension.
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No information found: When the query cannot be answered using connected sources, SiftHub avoids hallucinations and returns a message citing that No information was found that could answer the query from the connected knowledge sources.
Update your repository with information relevant to the unanswered query to expand the coverage of SiftHub’s answer generation for your product or service offerings.
View Sources for Generated Answer
- Every answer SiftHub generates comes with complete source transparency. View the exact sources used to craft your response directly in the browser extension.
- Scroll below the Generated Answer to find the Sources section, which shows you
- Content Type: Whether it's a PDF, Doc, Slack message, or Notion page
- Owner: The owner of the uploaded document, Q&A or file in connected app
- Last modified or created date: When the source was last modified or created
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Origin: Whether it's from SiftHub's Documents/Q&As or connected platforms like Google Drive, Notion, or Slack
- You can click on the tile for each source to be redirected in a new browser tab to the uploaded file, or the file path in the platform where the source was connected.
For answers containing Q&As in the generation source, you can click on the source tile and view details about the Q&A in a modal that pops up within the browser extension itself.
Note: Documents and Q&As in your organization’s repository will be accessible to all active users for your account.
For sources added using Connectors, if a user does not have access to a file in the connected platform, then that file will neither be visible in the SiftHub repository to that user nor will it be considered during answer generation when that user asks SiftHub a query.
Refine the answer further
- You can click on Modify Answer under the generated answer within the browser extension to change the tone and nature of the answer, vary its length and target the answer content to a specific industry.
- You also have the option to provide custom free-text instructions to determine the content, formatting, tonality, length and more characteristics of the answer generated.
- To configure other aspects of the answer generated, click on Settings (gear icon) beside Generate in the browser extension.
- You can View Alternate Answer or Matched Q&As within the browser extension by scrolling through the answer versions with each of your modifications applied. For any version that you prefer, you can also Save as Q&A to let your team members benefit from your edits for future generated answers to related questions.
- Once you are satisfied with the answer version, you can either Copy or Insert Answer. Copying retains the rich formatting elements of the generated answer and stores it on your clipboard so you can paste it anywhere in the browser. Insert Answer in a Google Sheet lets you populate a selected cell directly with the generated answer with all its rich formatting intact.