Understanding How Solo Uses Multiple Information Sources
Solo becomes more powerful and provides more accurate answers when it has access to more of your company's knowledge. By connecting sources like Notion, Slack, Intercom, your codebase, and more, you create a centralized brain for your team. This guide will help you understand how Solo uses these sources and decide which ones are right for you to connect.
How Solo Selects Information for an Answer
When you ask Solo a question, it doesn't just guess where the answer might be. It follows a smart process to find the best possible information from all the sources you've connected.
Identifying Available Sources: First, Solo looks at all the integrations you have successfully connected and indexed, such as Notion, Slack, or your codebase.
Focusing the Search: For questions asked in Slack, you can configure specific channels to only use certain sources. For example, you can set up an
#engineering-helpchannel to primarily pull answers from the codebase, while a#support-questionschannel might focus on Intercom and Notion. If no specific sources are set for a channel, Solo will consider all available sources.Gathering and Ranking Context: Solo analyzes your question and gathers relevant snippets of information from all the selected sources. It then ranks every piece of information based on how relevant it is to your question. This ensures that the most important details rise to the top, no matter where they came from.
What Happens When Information Conflicts?
It's common for information to be duplicated or for older documents to contradict newer ones. Solo has a clear hierarchy for dealing with these situations:
Codebase is King: If there is conflicting information between any sources, the information found in the codebase is always considered the primary source of truth.
Most Recent Wins: For conflicts between any other sources (like two different Slack messages or Notion pages), Solo will prioritize the most recent information.
Benefits of Connecting More Sources
The more high-quality information you give Solo, the better it performs.
More Comprehensive Answers: With access to a wider range of knowledge, Solo can provide answers that are more complete, pulling context from a customer conversation in Intercom, a technical document in Notion, and the underlying code itself.
A Single Place for Questions: Your team members no longer need to remember whether to search in Slack, Notion, or another tool. They can simply ask Solo and get a consolidated answer.
Deeper Contextual Understanding: By connecting conversations to documentation and code, Solo builds a richer understanding of how your products and processes work, leading to more insightful responses.
Potential Downsides of More Sources
While more sources are generally better, it's important to consider the quality of the information you're providing.
Risk of Outdated Information: If a connected source contains old or incorrect information (like an archived project document in Notion), Solo might mistakenly use it to form an answer. The quality of Solo's answers reflects the quality of your documentation.
Information Overload: If there are too many sources with irrelevant or low-quality information, it can sometimes make it harder for Solo to pinpoint the exact right answer, even with its ranking system.
To get the most out of Solo, we recommend connecting your most reliable and actively maintained sources first. Regularly archiving old pages and using channel-specific configurations in Slack are great ways to ensure Solo always has the best and most relevant context.