What is Ask Fern?
Let your customers find answers in your documentation instantly.
Ask Fern is available on the Pro plan of Fern Docs. Billing is by usage.
Overview
Ask Fern is Fern’s AI Search feature that indexes your documentation and provides an interface for your users to ask questions and get answers. It helps our customers
- Decrease the time to find needed information – Help users quickly locate crucial documentation without navigating through a maze of tabs and endpoints.
- Integrate your product faster – Accelerate implementation with ready-to-use code samples that demonstrate practical applications.
- Surface where your docs have gaps – Identify documentation weaknesses through user feedback and search patterns.
Features
Custom prompting
Tailor Ask Fern behavior to your users’ needs.
Citations
Point users to the exact source of the answer.
Guidance
Add custom FAQs to Ask Fern.
Documents
Add custom documents to Ask Fern.
Integration with Algolia
Users can “Ask AI” or search your docs directly with Algolia.
All-in-one platform
Create seamless UX by offering a one-stop-shop for all API questions.
How it works
Ask Fern is a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system built on top of your documentation site that transforms your documentation into an intelligent, searchable knowledge base. The main parts of the Ask Fern system are:
- Content indexing – Fern automatically processes your documentation pages, breaking them into semantic chunks and converting each chunk into a vector using sentence embedding models. They’re stored in a database that serves as Ask Fern’s search index.
- Query processing – When users ask questions, Ask Fern vectorizes their query and searches the database to find the most relevant documentation chunks.
- Response generation – Ask Fern uses the retrieved chunks as context to generate accurate answers with citations for the user. If the initial context isn’t sufficient, it performs an additional keyword search.
Life of a query
Each Ask Fern user query follows these steps: