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Connecting Google Drive lets Alex answer candidate questions from documents you already keep in Drive — benefits guides, client one-pagers, role briefs, process docs.

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Overview

You authorize Alex with a single Google account, then browse that account’s Drive and tick the folders and shared drives whose files should sync. What Alex can see is exactly what that account can see. Access is read-only. Alex never uploads, edits, moves, or deletes anything in Drive.

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Permissions Requested

drive.readonly is Google’s read scope for Drive as a whole — there’s no per-folder equivalent. Alex only ever reads the folders and shared drives you explicitly tick; nothing else is fetched or indexed.Because the grant is scoped to an account, connect with a durable service or ops account, not an individual’s personal account. If that person leaves and their account is suspended, the connection can’t be reconnected — it has to be set up again from scratch.

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Installation

1

Open the Knowledge Base settings

In the Alex app, go to Settings > Knowledge Base and click the Google Drive card.
2

Connect

Click Connect, sign in with the Google account, and approve read-only Drive access. You’ll return to Alex with the message “Google Drive connected — choose which drives and folders to sync”.
3

Pick folders

Browse the tree and tick the shared drives and folders whose files Alex may answer from.
4

Save

Click Update Connection. The first sync starts within 15 minutes.

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Choosing What Syncs

Google Drive settings showing My Drive, Shared with me, and a shared drive, with one selected folder chip The tree has three roots: Expand any row to browse into it and select folders at any depth. You can also tick a whole shared drive. Google Drive folder tree expanded to show a subfolder Everything you’ve picked appears under Selected, as removable chips. The summary line previews the result — for example, “1 file will sync.” Click files… on a selected folder to open its file list, where you can switch individual files off or scope them to specific jobs. Sync content updated in the last limits files by modification time: 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, 6 months, 1 year, or All time (the default).
Narrowing the freshness window removes files that fall outside it on the next sync, rather than just holding them back.

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Supported Files

Google Forms, Drawings, Sites, and shortcuts are skipped — there’s no text worth indexing. Other file types and oversized files are skipped too. Skipped files don’t fail the sync; they’re simply not indexed.
Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides have no size limit, because Alex reads them through Drive’s export rather than downloading the file.
Scanned PDFs with no text layer are still read: Alex falls back to optical character recognition when a PDF has no extractable text.

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Sync Behavior

  • Alex checks the connection every 15 minutes. There’s no manual sync button.
  • The first run is a full crawl of the selected folders; later runs pick up only what changed.
  • Files deleted or moved out of a selected folder are removed from Alex. If a selected folder is unreachable during a run, Alex skips deletion processing that run rather than risk clearing your content.
  • Saving your selection makes the next run a full re-crawl.

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Unreachable Folders

If a selected folder or shared drive can no longer be read, the panel warns that some selected locations are no longer reachable — they may have been deleted or un-shared. Common causes: the folder was deleted, it was un-shared from the connected account, or the account was removed from a shared drive. Re-share the folder with the connected account, or untick it in Alex and pick another.

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Pausing and Reconnecting

  • Disable pauses syncing and retrieval while preserving indexed content, so Enable takes effect immediately.
  • Reconnect re-runs authorization when the grant has been revoked in Google.
Reconnection must use the same Google account the connection was created with. What a Drive grant can read depends entirely on the account, so a different one would sync different content. Alex refuses the mismatch and leaves your existing content untouched.
To remove the connection and delete its synced content entirely, contact Alex support.

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Troubleshooting

The account has an empty Drive, no shared drives, and nothing shared with it — or the Drive API is disabled for your Google Workspace. Confirm the account can open Drive in a browser and see files.
Consent was cancelled, or your Google Workspace admin restricts third-party app access. Ask your Workspace administrator to allow the Alex app, then click Connect again.
Alex pins the connection to the account it was created with. Sign in as that account. If the account no longer exists, the connection has to be set up fresh — contact Alex support.
Check the file type against the table above — Forms, Drawings, Sites, shortcuts, and unsupported types are skipped, as are uploaded files over 25 MB. Also check the freshness window.
Items shared directly with the account appear under Shared with me only if they’re folders. A file shared on its own has no folder to select — move it into a shared folder, or upload it to a folder the account owns.