Overview
Ground an agent's answers in documents synced from your existing tools.
Knowledge Base lets your agent give grounded, up-to-date answers by syncing documents from your existing tools. Instead of relying solely on its training data, the agent retrieves relevant content from your connected sources before responding — a technique known as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
How it works#
When you connect a knowledge source, Runbear syncs the documents and indexes them for retrieval. During a conversation, the agent searches the indexed content, finds relevant passages, and uses them to formulate its response.
Sync is incremental — Runbear periodically checks for changes and updates only the content that has been added, modified, or removed.
Knowledge Base vs Tool#
Knowledge Base and Tools serve complementary purposes:
| Knowledge Base | Tool (MCP) | |
|---|---|---|
| How it works | Pre-synced documents searched at query time | Real-time API calls on demand |
| Best for | Answering questions from existing docs | Live lookups, actions, and writes |
| Example | "What's our vacation policy?" → retrieves from the HR wiki | "Create a ticket for this bug" → calls Linear API |
Most agents benefit from both — connect a knowledge base for grounded answers and tools for real-time actions.
Supported sources#
| Source | Description |
|---|---|
| Notion | Sync pages and databases from your Notion workspace |
| Confluence | Sync spaces and pages from Atlassian Confluence |
| Google Drive | Sync documents, spreadsheets, and files from Google Drive |
| Slack | Sync messages and threads from selected Slack channels |
| SharePoint | Sync documents and pages from Microsoft SharePoint |
| Website | Crawl and sync content from any public website |
| Local Files | Upload files directly from your computer |
Setup#
- Open your agent in the Runbear dashboard and go to the Knowledge tab.
- Select a source.
- Authorize access to the source (for cloud-based sources like Notion or Google Drive).
- Select the specific content to sync — pages, folders, channels, or URLs depending on the source.
- Runbear begins the initial sync. You can check progress on the sync status screen.
Once the initial sync completes, the agent can immediately use the content to answer questions.
For detailed instructions, see the guide for each source above.
Keeping content up to date#
After the initial sync, Runbear periodically checks for changes and updates the index automatically. There is no manual refresh needed — your agent always has access to the latest content.