Collections¶
Give your chatbot access to your files — grouped into a collection — whether that's sending them to participants during a conversation, or letting the chatbot search them to answer questions. There are two types of collections, depending on what you want to do:
- Want to send files to participants in a conversation? Use a Media collection — share images, PDFs, video, or audio directly in the chat.
- Want your chatbot to answer questions using your documents? Use an Indexed collection — it searches your files and grounds its answers in that content (RAG).
Adding a collection to a chatbot¶
- Navigate to the Collections section in the sidebar, click "Add new", and choose a collection type: Media Collection or Indexed Collection (RAG).
- Once the collection is created, you will be able to upload files to it.
- For indexed collections, you'll also need to choose between a Remote and a Local index before uploading — see Which should I use?.
- After your collection has been created, you can link it to any LLM node. To actually access the collection's content, add the matching prompt variable to the node's prompt —
{media}for media collections, or{collection_index_summaries}for indexed collections.
Collections and published chatbots¶
Collection content is a live shared resource: updates to your files in a collection reach your published chatbot automatically, without a republish. This applies whether you update a collection manually or via a scheduled document-source sync.
- Adding or removing files from a media collection takes effect for participants immediately.
- Document-source syncs to an indexed collection — for example, nightly Confluence or GitHub syncs — are applied to the published chatbot as each sync completes.
The collection structure of a published chatbot version — which collections are linked to which pipeline nodes — is still frozen at publish time. To change which collections a chatbot uses, you must publish a new version.
What this means for drift detection
Because collection content is live, adding files to a collection or waiting for a document-source sync no longer marks your chatbot as having unpublished changes. Only changes to the chatbot's pipeline configuration and settings are tracked as pending changes.
Existing published chatbots
This live-collection behavior applies to chatbots republished after this change was introduced (2026-06-03). Chatbots that were published before retain their previous frozen collection snapshot until the next time they are republished.
For more detail on versioning in general, see Versioning.