AI knowledge base

The AI features in HomeHerald — Herald Chat, email categorization, suggested actions on Herald Shield — work best when they have community-specific context. The AI knowledge base is where you point them at sources to learn from.

What the knowledge base does

The AI uses configured sources to:

• Answer resident questions in Herald Chat
• Suggest violation classifications in Herald Shield
• Categorize incoming emails
• Cite sources in answers (“Per [your community website]…”)

Without configured sources, the AI uses generic HOA knowledge — workable for general questions, but not specific to your community.

What you can configure

There are three knowledge sources you can enable:

Source	What it does
External websites	Crawl your HOA’s public website to learn its content (up to 5 sites)
Index announcements	Use your community’s own announcements as a knowledge source
Index neighborhood requests	Use resolved neighborhood requests and their updates as a source

The AI & Integrations page is where you configure these.

External websites

If your HOA has a public website with rules, FAQs, board info, etc., you can have the AI crawl it:

1. Add the URL (e.g., yourhoa.com or a specific page like yourhoa.com/rules)
2. Enable the crawl
3. The system fetches the pages and indexes them

Up to 5 external websites can be configured.

Useful when:

• Your HOA has a community website separate from HomeHerald
• You have rules / FAQs already published on a public page
• You want the AI to answer questions consistent with what’s on your site

If you don’t have a public site, this section stays empty — the AI works fine without it, just with less community-specific context.

Index announcements

Toggle this on and the system uses your community’s announcements as AI source material. When residents ask Herald Chat “when’s the next board meeting?” the AI can pull from a recent announcement that mentioned the meeting date.

This is usually safe to leave on. Announcements are already visible to residents — putting them in the AI’s context just makes the AI more accurate.

Index neighborhood requests

Toggle this on and the AI can reference resolved neighborhood requests when answering questions. Useful when, say, a resident asks “what’s the status on the playground repair?” and the AI can pull from the related neighborhood request that has the resolution.

This is generally safe to enable. The AI only references resolved requests, not active or private ones. Individual complaints (private to the parties involved) are never indexed.

What the AI does with the sources

When a resident asks Herald Chat a question:

1. The system searches the configured sources for relevant content
2. The AI generates an answer grounded in what it found
3. The answer references where the info came from
4. If no good source is found, the AI acknowledges uncertainty rather than guessing

You’ll see this in action under Configuration → Herald Chat. Each AI response shows what it referenced.

Privacy considerations

Sources in the knowledge base are visible to:

• Admins (full read access)
• Herald Chat (uses them to answer resident questions)

Sources are NOT shared between communities. Each community’s knowledge base is isolated.

Don’t add private information (board internal discussions, specific resident personnel issues) to the public sources. Anything in the knowledge base may be referenced in Herald Chat responses to residents.

When the AI gives a wrong answer

Most often the cause is:

• The external website source is outdated or wrong
• The configured sources don’t cover the topic the resident asked about
• The AI misinterpreted ambiguous language

When you spot a wrong answer:

• Check what the AI cited — is the source itself accurate?
• If yes, the AI may be drawing the wrong conclusion — consider making the source more explicit
• If the source is wrong (outdated public page), update the source

Common situations

”We just updated the rules on our website”

The AI re-crawls external websites periodically. If a recent change isn’t being reflected, you can usually trigger a re-crawl from the settings page.

”Residents keep asking the same question that’s not in any source”

Add it. Either:

• Add an announcement explaining it (and enable Index announcements)
• Update your public website (if the AI is crawling it)
• Have the board write a community-wide FAQ that gets posted as an announcement

”We don’t have a public website”

That’s fine. Leave External websites empty and rely on Index announcements + Index neighborhood requests. The AI still works — just with less community-specific context.

”The AI doesn’t seem to be using our site’s content”

Check that the URL is correct, the site is publicly accessible (not behind login), and that the crawl is enabled. If everything looks right, contact support@homeherald.ai.

Where to go next

• Herald Chat — the main consumer of the knowledge base
• Configuring Herald Shield — Shield also benefits from accurate sources
• Integrations — connecting external systems