Knowledge Base & Indexing

Give CoPilot your own documents to answer from, index your parts so you can find them by describing their shape, and store the facts it should remember about how you work.

Three separate stores

• Documents — PDFs, Word files, spreadsheets, Markdown, plain text. Searchable, and quoted back when relevant.
• Parts — a searchable summary of a CAD part's geometry, so you can find it later by describing what it looks like.
• Memory — short durable facts about you and your work: units, materials, current project.

Indexing a document

Use the Index Document button (the book icon in the chat toolbar), or just ask. Accepted formats are PDF, DOCX, XLSX, MD and TXT.

A document can be filed as a general document or as a spec. Specs are the ones you want treated as authoritative — material standards, fastener tables, company drafting rules.

How it works

The file's text is split into small chunks; each chunk is converted into an embedding — a numeric representation of its meaning — and stored. When you later ask a question, CoPilot retrieves the passages closest in meaning to your question and answers from them. That is why a question phrased in your own words still finds the right paragraph, even when it shares no keywords with it.

Asking questions of your documents

You can also put an indexed answer straight to work:

Indexing parts — search by shape

“We made something like this two years ago” is a real and expensive problem. Indexing a part stores a summary of its geometry so you can find it again by describing it.

The extraction happens locally on your workstation; only the summary is uploaded. Later, from any document:

You get back candidates with their part numbers and file locations; open the one you want and carry on from it.

Memory — facts CoPilot keeps

Memory is per-user and persists between conversations and between sessions. Use it for the standing facts you would otherwise repeat every day.

Later, in a new conversation:

And when something changes:

Memory versus a skill

They overlap, and the distinction is worth getting right:

• Memory holds facts — “our default material is 6061-T6”. Private to you.
• A skill holds instructions — “always assign the default material to a new part without asking”. Shareable across the organization.

Facts you would tell a colleague go in memory. Rules you would put in a work instruction go in a skill.

Past conversations

Your own chat history is searchable too, which is useful when you know you solved something before but not how.

Managing what is stored

Documents, memories and chat history are all visible in the organization portal, where you can review and delete them. Indexed content is scoped to your organization and your account — it is not shared beyond it, and it is not used to train models.

See Organization Admin Guide for the portal pages, and for who in your organization can see what.

Getting good answers

1. Index the source, not a summary of it. The original standard retrieves better than someone's notes about it.
2. Split enormous documents by subject where you can. A 600-page manual indexed as one file competes with itself for relevance.
3. File authoritative sources as specs so they are distinguishable from general reference.
4. Ask for the source whenever the answer will drive a design decision.
5. Re-index when a document is revised. Nothing detects a superseded standard for you.

See also

• Chat Basics
• Skills
• Verifying results
• Organization Admin Guide