Transcription
[Music] AI is powerful because of the vast amount of knowledge it has access to. But when you use a generic chatbot, none of that knowledge is personalized to you or your work.
Notion AI can search through information across your workspace and connected apps, making it easier to get answers to questions without interrupting your colleagues. In this lesson, we'll explore what we mean by AI search, when to use it, and how to configure it in your workspace.
Traditional search looks for exact matches to your search terms. But AI actually understands the meaning behind your questions, giving much more accurate and comprehensive results, even answering your questions directly without making you skim docs for what you need. Plus, it can search across multiple sources at once: your Slack, Notion, documentation, Google Drive, and more, to combine that information into a single, coherent answer.
The more information you add to your workspace and connect to Notion, the more powerful AI search becomes. It's like having an expert colleague who has read every document and can instantly recall any piece of information you need. Unlike a know-it-all colleague, though, the answers from Notion AI respect permissions, not giving out information unless you already have access to it. They're cited so you can look at the exact source, and most importantly, doesn't require you to interrupt your working flow for awkward small talk.
Generally speaking, there's three use cases where AI search really shines: questions about process, questions about projects, and questions about facts.
Let's start with questions about process. When you're new to a company or project, Notion AI can help you find basic information, like how to set up your new computer or where to find important documents. As a more specific example, consider team onboarding. A new team member can ask AI, "How do I pay for a hotel while traveling for work?" They'll get a relevant answer from the company wiki and troubleshooting tips from recent questions asked across Slack.
Next is questions about projects. With AI connectors in place, Notion AI can be used to search across all of your most important apps to find and synthesize information on your behalf. For example, maybe you're an engineer looking for best practices on implementing a certain technology. You need more than just a generic answer; you need to know how this should actually work in your codebase. Notion AI combines the power of general coding knowledge, your engineering wiki, and your GitHub repository to give you a more helpful, more trustworthy solution to your problem.
Finally, there's the simple use case of questions about facts or quick recall. Have you ever remembered seeing a specific piece of information but couldn't quite figure out where to find it? With Notion AI at your side, you can simply ask for what you need. The find in menu lets you narrow your search to the most likely location, perfect for tracking down that one statistic from a previous all-hands presentation.
Now that you understand when to use AI search, let's look at how to actually use and configure it in your workspace.
Accessing AI search is simple. All you have to do is head into your Notion app and click on the AI face in either the sidebar for full-page search or the bottom right-hand corner for an assistant chat experience. Once you're here, ask your question to start getting answers.
Of course, as we've already discussed, the more knowledge Notion AI has access to, the more helpful it will be for you. There's two ways to feed Notion AI more information, but both depend on it being written down. More on that in our culture of documentation lesson.
Here, the first is to import information into Notion using the Importer tools found in Settings. Here you can import from any number of apps or directly upload files like PDFs, Word documents, and more. As long as this information lives in a place you have access to, it'll come up in Notion AI's responses. In other words, you can feel free to import it now and not worry about making it pretty until later on.
The second, and arguably simpler, way to teach Notion AI about your company context is to use AI connectors. To add these, click the three-dot icon in the top right-hand corner of your AI chat and select an app. At the time of making this video, Notion AI connects to Slack, Google Drive, GitHub, and Jira, with more apps on the way. Given the technical complexities of working across tools, each app has slightly different setup flows and requirements, so I'll point you to Notion's help center for those details. Once your sync is in progress, you'll be able to come back to this menu to check its status.
Once you're happy with the quality and quantity of information in Notion, AI search away by asking questions. You can narrow down results using the source picker, for example, selecting Slack to only search through team conversations. As you receive answers, ask follow-up questions to dig deeper into specific topics until you have the exact information you need.
That's it for this lesson on AI search. Now that you know how to configure and use AI search in your workspace, you can start finding information faster and more efficiently. Remember, the more information you add to Notion, the more apps you connect, the more powerful AI search becomes. And by the way, if you ever need AI to answer a question about itself or anything else in Notion, all you have to do is ask. The Notion help center is at your fingertips.
In our next lesson, we'll explore how to use Notion AI to enhance your writing and documentation. See you there.
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