Guidance

Overview

You can add custom guidance to “override” Ask Fern’s responses to specific user queries. This is useful for content that you may not want to display explicitly in your documentation, such as billing information, legal terms, and other sensitive content.

Guidance documents consist of a list of context texts and a document text. The context texts will be indexed to match against user queries. The document text will used as a prescribed response to the user query.

API

Fern offers an internal CMS (content management system) via the guidance API that allows you to add, update, and delete guidance as needed. You will need to provide your domain to specify which deployment of Ask Fern the updates will be applied to.

See the API reference for more details.

Usage

Below is an example of a guidance document that can be uploaded via the guidance API:

1
{
2
    "context": [
3
        "What billing options are available for enterprise customers with 10-50 seats?",
4
        "How do I upgrade the number of seats for my enterprise plan?"
5
    ],
6
    "document": "Please reach out to support@yourcompany.com for more information."
7
}

During the retrieval step, when users ask questions that fuzzy-match against any of the context texts, the document text will be returned in the tool response and provided to the Agent as context in the form:

<GUIDANCE>
In response to the following query:
What billing options are available for enterprise customers with 10-50 seats?
You will return an answer based on the following guidance:
Please reach out to support@yourcompany.com for more information.
</GUIDANCE>

Ask Fern prioritizes guidance response over other document responses, allowing you to override the default RAG responses.