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How AI agents answer

An agent answers only from material its owner gave it. It shows you the passage behind each answer, and says so when it doesn’t know.

Where answers come from

When you ask a question, hiy finds the passages in the owner’s material that fit it best. An AI then writes the answer from those passages, in the voice its owner chose.

It doesn’t search the web or fill gaps from general knowledge. If the material doesn’t cover your question, the agent says it doesn’t know.

How one question becomes an answer

  1. Question1–2000 characters.
  2. embedQueryTurn it into one vector.
  3. match_chunksRetrieve top matching passages; search at most three times.
  4. AnswerGrounded in the retrieved context and platform rules.

possible outcome

  1. Cited answerOne citation per source.
  2. Honest gapMissing material is queued to knowledge_gaps.
The pipeline does not fork at the end. Nothing in it can invent a source: the citations are built from the passages the answer actually drew on, and they are stored on every answer. The dashed feed is a second, conditional write — it happens when the answer admits the material is missing, which a partial answer can do while still citing what it had.

Why answers show sources

An answer you can’t check is only a claim. So a grounded answer names its source: press read under the answer to see the exact passage it used. If the source is a web page, Read the original takes you there. An Expert Twin shows them only when you turn on Show where answers come from.

A visitor's question, the agent's answer, and below it the excerpt from the owner's own page that the answer usedA visitor's question, the agent's answer, and below it the excerpt from the owner's own page that the answer used
A public chat, with the source opened

Only your words are quoted

To answer well, hiy also writes its own summary of your material. That summary is never shown to visitors, so anything in quotation marks is your own writing.

Note

Your own test chat can show more sources than visitors see, because it also lists hiy’s summary, labelled as hiy’s. The answer is the same.

The three states of a passage’s provenance

source

  1. Creator’s own wordsChunked from a source row.
  2. A citationPlus a link when the source had a URL.

summary

  1. hiy’s synthesisThe wiki has no source row.
  2. Dropped from the wirecitationsForVisitor() removes it.

absent

  1. Nothing knowsThe row predates provenance.
  2. A citation, as alwaysNever guessed to be a source.
Half the retrieval index is a summary hiy writes. Showing it to a visitor, however carefully labelled, would present a machine’s paraphrase where the creator’s own material is promised — so it is dropped server-side, not hidden in the view.

Choose how sources appear

In your agent’s settings, open Rules › Sources & citations:

  • Show sources on answers is on at first for a Support or Team Agent. Turn it off to keep your material private: visitors then get no sources at all. An Expert Twin’s switch is Show where answers come from, off at first.
  • Verifiable receipts is off at first. Turn it on to show the exact passage open under every answer, instead of the small read link.

What “I don’t know” means

When the material doesn’t support an answer, the agent says so. That’s by design, not a failure. You can choose its words in Rules › When it can’t answer, but it must start by saying it doesn’t have the answer.

The question goes to your Teach queue. Answer it once, and the agent uses your words from then on.

It shows you where it looked

An “I don’t know” comes with the searches it ran: your question first, then any rewordings it tried. If the owner keeps sources private, you see how many searches ran but not their wording.

Two gap matchers, deliberately out of step

display path · wide

  1. The answerOne string of text.
  2. looksLikeGap()The browser detects a broad range of admissions.
  3. Dashed panelShows the honest-gap treatment and search receipt.

write path · narrow

  1. The same answerRead again on the server.
  2. isHonestUncertainty()Uses the narrower matcher.
  3. knowledge_gapsQueues a creator task, up to 100 open gaps.
The two used to disagree on purpose, and the disagreement was the bug: the server gate demanded a literal “I don’t know” while a Support Agent is told to say “that isn’t something I have from …”, so it matched none of the 24 real declines in the labelled corpus and the queue never filled.

Laid-out answers

On the Starter plan, an answer’s numbered steps are laid out as steps while it is written. The layout uses only the agent’s own words and never adds a fact, number or link.

Turn it on or off for each agent in Rules › Laid-out answers. It’s on at first.

What an agent is not

It isn’t a person. It’s a clearly labelled AI, and it can be wrong. It has no access to its owner’s calendar, inbox or private life.

Good to know

  • No plan removes the AI label, the honest “I don’t know”, the sources behind answers, the Report link or the Verified badge.
  • The honest “I don’t know” and its searches are on every plan.
  • Laid-out answers are on Starter only. The free plan keeps answers as text.

Related

If you're talking to an AI agent

What it is, what it isn’t, and what happens to what you say.

What your agent answers

Keep it on your subjects instead of behaving like a general chatbot.

The hiy.ai credit

What the “Powered by hiy.ai” line is, and what no plan can remove.

Sources

Every way to get your material in, and what happens to it once it’s there.

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