Ask Fern now sits in your documentation's sidebar

TLDR: We’ve made three improvements to Ask Fern, the AI assistant for documentation: 

1. Sidebar: We shifted Ask Fern from a popup modal to a sidebar so users can ask questions while browsing your documentation.
2. New API endpoints: Connect Ask Fern to your blog posts, help center, or marketing site for more complete answers. The new Documents API makes it easy to add context that lives outside your docs.
3. Filtering: Users can tailor Ask Fern responses by filtering on version, product, and role (RBAC).

Introduce a sidebar interface to your documentation with Ask Fern  

We’ve revised our Ask Fern experience to live within a sidebar directly in your docs, so you can chat with Ask Fern while browsing content. This reduces context switching for readers and makes it easier to get answers to questions. 

Bring in outside sources with our Documents API 

We’ve added a Documents API that lets you extend Ask Fern’s knowledge beyond your documentation by indexing additional custom content. You can add materials such as:

• Internal FAQs
• Help desk tickets
• Knowledge base articles
• Marketing sites
• Blog posts
• Research papers
• And more

To get started, upload a document, title, and URL via the Documents API. Ask Fern can then use this content to answer developer questions and surface the URL as a citation if referenced. 

1{
2	"document": "Ferns are plants native to the tropical and subtropical regions of the world. They are characterized by their fronds, which are large, leaf-like structures that are often found in the understory of forests.",
3	"title": "What are ferns?",
4	"url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fern"
5}

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Ask Fern filtering  based on versions, products, and RBAC

We’ve launched filtering for Ask Fern, so users will get responses that are only related to the product or version they are viewing, or the role they are administered. You can keep your documentation personalized, while ensuring sensitive information stays protected. 

Explore Ask Fern today 

Ready to bring AI-powered search into your documentation? We’d love to help you get started. Reach out and see how Ask Fern can instantly answer questions for users reading your documentation. 

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