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Ask AI is a conversational assistant built directly into your Help Center. It answers customer questions instantly, powered entirely by the articles you’ve published in your knowledge base, no separate setup or third-party tools needed. When Ask AI reaches the limit of what your knowledge base covers, it hands off to your team with full context of the conversation. Ask AI only reads articles that are Published in your knowledge base. Draft articles are not used.
Ask AI in Plain

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How it works

When a customer visits your Help Center and asks a question, Ask AI searches your published articles and generates a synthesized answer, referencing the relevant articles so customers can read further if they want to. If a customer isn’t satisfied, they can either type “Talk to a human” or click Continue with a human in the top right corner. Either way, a new thread is instantly created in your Plain workspace with the full Ask AI conversation attached, so your team has complete context and never asks the customer to repeat themselves. Every Ask AI conversation is logged and visible to your team in Plain, so you can spot recurring questions and find gaps in your knowledge base.

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Getting the best out of Ask AI

Ask AI is only as good as the articles behind it. If customers are getting vague or incorrect answers, the most common cause is the quality or structure of the underlying content. A few things that help:
  • Write one article per topic: Ask AI retrieves and cites tightly scoped articles more accurately than long, multi-topic pages
  • Use clear, descriptive titles: Ask AI uses article titles to understand relevance
  • Write in plain language: Straightforward prose works better than heavily technical or jargon-heavy content
  • Keep articles up to date: Outdated content leads to outdated answers

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Ask AI vs Ari

Ask AI is the self-service assistant in your Help Center, it answers questions from customers browsing your docs. Ari is Plain’s AI agent that works within support threads, drafting replies and helping your team respond faster. They’re complementary but separate features.

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Controlling AI access

You can enable or disable Ask AI’s access to your knowledge base independently of your Help Center’s human access settings, for example, keeping a Help Center set to “Your team only” while still allowing AI features to reference the articles. See Access & Authentication → for details.