Understanding answers and source citations

The answer that comes back from Muninnbase is not a guess. It is built from the documents your company has uploaded, and the system shows you exactly which document and which page it came from. Reading those source citations is half the job.

Every answer is grounded in your documents

Muninnbase does not pull from the open internet. It does not pull from a generic AI's training data. It does not make things up. Every answer is assembled from the files your admins have uploaded, and nothing else. If something is not in those documents, the system tells you so out loud rather than guessing.

This is the single most important thing to know about how Muninnbase works. Other AI chat tools sound confident regardless of whether they know the answer. Muninnbase is built to refuse when it doesn't know, and to show its work when it does.

Source pills tell you where the answer came from

Below most answers, you'll see one or more pills shaped like buttons. Each pill shows the filename, the page number, and the section heading from the original document. Click a pill and Muninnbase fetches the source for you.

What happens next depends on the file type. PDFs and plain-text files open in a new browser tab so you can read the surrounding context right there. DOCX, XLSX, and RTF files download to your computer so you can open them in Word, Excel, or your preferred editor. Either way, the file you get is the original your admins uploaded, unmodified.

Why citations matter

The pill is your verification tool. If the answer says "PTO accrues at 1.25 days per month" and the pill points to a policy dated 2019, you might want to check whether anything has changed since. If the answer is paraphrased and you need the exact wording, the pill takes you there in one click.

The pill exists so you can confirm the answer against the actual source. Not so you can take the system's word for it.

When you see "I don't have an answer to that in the available documents."

That exact message means Muninnbase looked at every document it has access to and could not find the answer. This is the right behavior. Other AI tools fill the gap with a plausible-sounding guess; Muninnbase tells you it doesn't know.

If you see this message, the gap is real. Either the document with that answer hasn't been uploaded yet, or it was uploaded but the answer isn't actually in it. The next step is to flag it with the thumbs-down button so your admins know to fill the gap. See the next article for how that works.

A note on streaming

Answers appear word by word as the system generates them. That's normal, and the same thing every modern AI chat does. The full answer usually finishes in a few seconds. Source pills appear once the answer is complete, not while it's still streaming.

If the answer stops partway through and doesn't finish, something went wrong on the server side. Refreshing the page and asking again usually works; if it happens repeatedly, tell your admin.

What to do next

Now that you can read what comes back, the last piece is what to do when the answer is wrong, incomplete, or missing. When Muninnbase doesn't know: thumbs down and feedback covers the feedback loop that makes the knowledge base better over time.