Help Center

Creating Your Account

Signing up for Ask360 is free and takes less than a minute.

1. Click Sign Up Free on the homepage or navigation bar.
2. Enter your first name, last name, username, and email address.
3. Choose a password (minimum 8 characters).
4. Optionally enter your company or organization name. If you leave this blank, we'll use your full name.
5. Accept the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
6. Complete the CAPTCHA verification and click Create Account.

You'll receive a verification email. Click the link in the email to activate your account. If you don't see the email, check your spam folder or use the Resend Verification Email option on the login page.

Completing Your Profile

After verifying your email, you'll be asked to complete your profile. All fields are optional and you can skip this step entirely. The profile asks for:

• Phone number (for account support if needed)
• Industry (helps us tailor suggestions for your projects)
• How you found us (helps us improve our outreach)

Once complete, you'll land on your project dashboard and can start creating your first knowledge portal.

Understanding Your Dashboard

Your project dashboard is your home base. It shows:

• Active projects with document count, query count, and storage usage per project.
• Monthly usage summary showing queries used vs. remaining for your billing cycle.
• Paused projects (if any) shown separately at lower opacity. Paused projects don't count toward your active project limit but still consume storage.
• Quick actions to create new projects, upload documents, or view settings.

Creating a Project

A project is your AI knowledge portal. Each project has its own documents, branding, system prompt, and chat URL.

1. Click Create Project from your dashboard.
2. Enter a project name (e.g., "Employee Handbook", "Product Support").
3. Add an optional description that helps visitors understand what the portal covers.
4. Set a URL suffix. This becomes part of your portal's web address. It's auto-generated from the project name but you can customize it. Only lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens are allowed (2-30 characters).
5. Click Create.

Your portal URL will be: https://ask360.app/chat/{your-company}-{your-suffix}

Project Statuses

Project Settings

Access project settings by clicking the gear icon on any project card, or from within a project.

Basic Information

• Name and Description shown to visitors on your portal.
• Category helps organize and suggest default questions. Choose from Internal Teams, Customer Support, Operations & Training, or Communities.

Chat Configuration

• System Prompt defines your AI's personality, role, and behavior. For example: "You are a friendly HR assistant for Acme Corp. Answer questions about company policies in a professional tone." You can write your own or click Auto-Generate to create one from your uploaded documents.
• Welcome Message is the first message visitors see when they open your chat (default: "Hi! How can I help you today?").
• Chat Placeholder is the hint text in the input field (default: "Type your question...").
• Disclaimer is optional text shown below the chat input for legal or usage notices.
• Suggested Questions are clickable prompts shown below the welcome message to help visitors get started. Up to 5 questions. These auto-generate based on your documents and category.
• Response Detail Level controls how detailed the AI's answers are:
  • Concise gives brief, direct answers.
  • Standard balances detail with brevity.
  • Comprehensive provides thorough answers with context (default).
  • Elaborate gives the most detailed answers possible.

Feature Toggles

• Feedback Buttons let visitors rate responses with thumbs up/down.
• Print Button lets visitors print the conversation.
• Save Button lets visitors download the conversation.

Rate Limiting

Set a maximum number of requests per minute (RPM) for your project. This prevents abuse and controls costs. Leave blank to use the default for your plan.

Branding Your Portal

Make your AI portal match your brand identity.

• Primary Color controls the header gradient, buttons, and links.
• Secondary Color controls the gradient end and secondary elements.
• Logo appears in the chat header next to your project name.
• Tagline is optional promotional text.
• Footer Text is optional attribution text at the bottom of your portal.

Colors are entered as hex values (e.g., #2563eb). Use the color picker for easy selection.

API Keys

Each project has two API keys:

• Public Key (starts with pk_) is safe to include in frontend code and embed snippets. It identifies your project.
• Secret Key (starts with sk_) should never be exposed in frontend code. Use it only in server-to-server integrations.

You can regenerate either key at any time from Project Settings. Regenerating a key immediately invalidates the old one.

Publishing Your Project

When you're ready to go live:

1. Make sure you've uploaded at least one document and it shows status Ready.
2. Review your system prompt, welcome message, and branding.
3. Change the project status to Published.
4. Share your portal URL or embed the widget on your website.

You can pause or unpublish your project at any time. Published projects are accessible to anyone with the URL.

How Documents Work

Documents are the foundation of your AI knowledge portal. When you upload a document, Ask360:

1. Extracts the text from your file (PDF, Word, Excel, HTML, Markdown, or plain text).
2. Splits it into chunks (passages of about 400 characters) for efficient search.
3. Creates embeddings (mathematical representations) of each chunk for semantic search.
4. Stores everything so the AI can find relevant passages when answering questions.

The AI only answers from the documents you've uploaded. It doesn't make up information or use external knowledge.

Supported File Formats

Maximum file size: 10 MB per document.

Adding Documents

There are several ways to add documents to your project:

File Upload

Upload files directly from your computer. Drag and drop or click to browse. After upload, the system extracts text and generates an AI-powered title and description suggestion that you can review and edit.

Import from URL

Paste a web page URL and Ask360 will fetch the content automatically. Works with public web pages, PDF links, and document URLs. The system extracts the main content and strips navigation, ads, and other non-content elements.

Editor

Type or paste text directly into the rich text editor. Useful for content that isn't in a file, like FAQ answers, policy summaries, or custom knowledge articles.

AI-Suggested URLs

Based on your project's name, description, and category, the AI can suggest relevant public URLs to import. This is helpful when setting up a new project and you want to quickly populate it with relevant content.

Document Statuses

The document list auto-refreshes every 15 seconds while documents are processing, so you don't need to manually reload.

AI-Generated Metadata

After a document is processed, the AI automatically generates:

• Summary providing an overview of the document's content and key points.
• Topics as tags that help categorize and organize your knowledge base.
• Suggested questions that visitors might ask based on this document's content.

You can view this metadata by clicking on a document in your document list. The suggested questions are used to populate the chat portal's quick-start prompts.

Managing Documents

• Search documents by title or filename using the search bar.
• Filter by status (Pending, Processing, Ready, Failed) to find specific documents.
• Sort by newest/oldest, title A-Z, or largest/smallest file size.
• Delete a document by clicking the delete icon. This removes the document and all its chunks from the search index. Deletion is permanent.

How the AI Chat Works

When a visitor asks a question, Ask360 follows this process:

1. Understands the question using semantic analysis (not just keyword matching).
2. Searches your documents using hybrid search that combines meaning-based and keyword-based retrieval.
3. Reranks results using a cross-encoder model to identify the most relevant passages.
4. Generates an answer using AI, grounded in the retrieved passages.
5. Streams the response in real time so visitors see the answer as it's written.
6. Shows source citations so visitors can verify where the information came from.

The AI is instructed to only answer from your documents. If it can't find relevant information, it will say so honestly rather than making something up.

Confidence Badges

Every AI response includes a confidence badge that tells visitors how well-supported the answer is by your documents. This is a key feature that builds trust.

Confidence is calculated using multiple signals: cross-encoder relevance scoring and vector similarity. This multi-signal approach is more reliable than using a single metric.

Source Citations

Every response includes a source bar at the bottom showing which documents were used to generate the answer. Citations include:

• The document title for easy identification.
• A relevant excerpt showing the specific passage that supports the answer.

Sources are automatically deduplicated so each document appears only once, even if multiple passages were used.

Chat Features

The chat interface includes several utility features (each can be enabled or disabled in project settings):

• New Chat clears the conversation and starts fresh.
• Print opens a print-friendly view of the current conversation. Great for meetings, reports, and record-keeping.
• Save downloads the conversation for offline reference or sharing with your team.
• Docs shows the list of documents in the knowledge base.
• About shows the project description and portal information.
• Feedback (thumbs up/down on each response) lets visitors rate answer quality. You can view this feedback in your project analytics.

Response Caching

Ask360 uses semantic caching to speed up responses and reduce costs. When a visitor asks a question that's very similar to a previous question (92%+ similarity), the cached answer is returned instantly.

The cache is per-project and automatically invalidated when you add or remove documents, so answers always reflect your current knowledge base.

Adding Chat to Your Website

The embed widget lets you add your AI chat portal to any website as a floating chat bubble. It works on WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, static HTML, and any other web platform.

Getting Your Embed Code

1. Go to your project's Widget tab.
2. Copy the embed code snippet.
3. Paste it into your website's HTML, just before the closing </body> tag.

The embed code looks like this:

<script
  src="https://ask360.app/widget.js"
  data-project="your-project-slug">
</script>

The widget is lightweight (under 10 KB), has no external dependencies, and loads lazily so it won't slow down your website.

How the Widget Works

• A chat bubble appears in the bottom-right corner of your website.
• Clicking the bubble opens a chat modal with your branded AI portal.
• The widget inherits all your project settings: branding, welcome message, system prompt, guardrails, and suggested questions.
• Conversations persist in the visitor's browser (localStorage) for 24 hours, so they can continue where they left off.
• Clicking outside the modal or pressing Escape closes it.

Direct Portal Link

You can also share your chat portal as a direct link without embedding. Your portal URL is:

https://ask360.app/chat/your-project-slug

This opens the full branded chat experience in the visitor's browser. Great for sharing via email, social media, or QR codes.

QR Code Sharing

Generate a QR code for your portal from the Widget tab. Visitors can scan the code with their phone to open your AI chat instantly. This is useful for printed materials, presentations, and physical locations.

Inviting Team Members

Collaborate with your team by inviting members to your organization.

1. Go to Team from the navigation menu (visible to owners and admins).
2. Click Invite Member.
3. Enter their email address and select a role.
4. They'll receive an invitation email with a link to join.

Invited members show as Pending until they accept the invitation and create their account.

Roles and Permissions

Managing Your Team

• Change roles by clicking the role dropdown next to a team member's name.
• Resend invitations for pending members who haven't accepted yet.
• Remove members by clicking the remove button. This is immediate and cannot be undone.

Plan Limits

Each plan includes a set of resources shared across all projects in your organization.

Enterprise plans have custom limits. Contact us for details.

Monitoring Usage

Track your usage from the Billing page (available to account owners):

• Queries Used shows your monthly query count with a progress bar. Resets on your billing cycle date.
• Storage Used shows total document storage across all projects.
• Document Count shows documents per project vs. limit.

Color-coded progress bars make it easy to see at a glance: green means plenty of headroom, yellow means approaching the limit (80%+), and red means at or over the limit.

Usage Alerts

Ask360 automatically creates alerts when you approach or reach your limits:

• Warning (yellow) at 80% of a limit, giving you time to act.
• Critical (red) at 100%, indicating the limit has been reached.

Alerts appear in the Alerts section of your navigation. You can mark alerts as read or resolved.

What Happens When You Hit a Limit

• Query limit reached: Chat visitors see a friendly message that the portal has reached its monthly limit. The portal remains accessible but won't answer new questions until the next billing cycle.
• Document limit reached: You can't upload new documents until you remove existing ones or upgrade your plan.
• Storage limit reached: You can't upload new documents until you free up space or upgrade.
• Project limit reached: You can't create new projects, but you can pause existing ones to free up a slot.

Upgrading Your Plan

Upgrade from the Billing page or the Upgrade link in your navigation menu. See our Pricing page for a full comparison of plans.

Profile Settings

Update your personal information from Settings in the user menu:

• First and Last Name
• Username (must be unique across the platform)
• Email (changing your email requires re-verification)
• Company Name
• Phone Number
• Industry

Changing Your Password

Change your password from the Settings page. You'll need to enter your current password for verification, then your new password twice to confirm. Minimum password length is 8 characters.

Billing

The Billing page (available to account owners) shows:

• Your current plan name and pricing.
• Usage statistics with visual progress bars.
• Plan limits and how much you've used.

Types of Alerts

Managing Alerts

The alert count badge in the navigation shows your unread, unresolved alerts. Click to view all alerts.

• Mark as read to acknowledge an alert.
• Resolve an alert once you've addressed the issue.

Alerts are deduplicated. You won't receive the same alert repeatedly within a 24-hour period.

Built-in Safety Features

Ask360 includes multiple layers of safety to protect your portal and your visitors:

Input Protection

• Content safety filter detects and blocks offensive or harmful queries.
• Prompt injection detection prevents manipulation attempts where someone tries to override your system prompt.
• Rate limiting prevents abuse by limiting requests per minute.

Output Protection

• PII detection identifies and redacts sensitive information like social security numbers, credit card numbers, and phone numbers in responses.
• Hallucination flagging warns visitors when the AI responds without strong document support (shown via confidence badges).
• Response length limits prevent runaway responses.

Guardrails are configurable per project so you can set the right level of strictness for your use case. Strict scope enforcement works well for compliance-sensitive portals, while more relaxed settings are appropriate for general information portals.