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Not everything worth answering from lives in Confluence, SharePoint, Notion, or Drive. Uploads let you put a document straight into the Knowledge Base — a benefits PDF, a candidate FAQ, a client one-pager — with no connection to set up. Uploads are available to every company, whether or not the other Knowledge Base sources are enabled.

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Uploading

In the Alex app, go to Settings > Knowledge Base and click the Uploads card. Knowledge Uploads panel with a drag-and-drop zone accepting txt, pdf, doc, and docx files up to 7 MB each Drag files onto the drop zone, or click it to browse. Files are indexed as soon as they finish processing — there’s no sync cycle to wait for.
Scanned PDFs with no text layer still work — Alex falls back to optical character recognition when a PDF has no extractable text.

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Managing Uploaded Documents

Uploaded documents listed with Synced and Global badges, an on/off toggle, and per-document controls Each row shows the file name, roughly how much indexed content it produced, and when it was uploaded, alongside:

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Replacing a document

Upload a file with the same name as an existing one and it replaces it. This is the intended way to publish an update — the old version stops being answerable as soon as the new one finishes processing.
Because replacement is keyed on the file name, keep names stable across revisions. benefits-guide.pdf updated in place is much easier to manage than benefits-guide-v2-final.pdf sitting alongside the original.

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Turning a document off

Switching a document off excludes it from Alex’s answers immediately, while keeping it in the list and keeping its indexed content — so switching it back on is instant. Use this rather than deleting when a policy is temporarily out of date.

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When Processing Fails

A document that can’t be read shows a Failed status. Alex’s message tells you what to do: fix the file and re-upload it with the same name to retry. Common causes:
  • The PDF is a pure image with no text layer and OCR couldn’t read it — try a higher-quality scan.
  • The file is password-protected or otherwise encrypted.
  • The file is corrupt, or its extension doesn’t match its actual format (a .docx that’s really a .pages file, for instance).

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Uploads vs. Connected Sources

Use an upload when

The content is stable, self-contained, and doesn’t have a natural home in a connected tool — or you want something answerable today without waiting on an integration.

Use a connected source when

The content is already maintained somewhere and changes over time. Syncing means Alex tracks the edits automatically; an upload has to be replaced by hand.
An uploaded document is a point-in-time copy. If the underlying policy changes and nobody re-uploads the file, Alex will keep answering from the stale version. For anything that changes regularly, connect the source instead.