Put Your Team's Knowledge to Work with Reasoning Fuel

Your published documentation is part of a larger body of product knowledge. Support teams work through unusual configurations, product experts explain the reasoning behind a feature, and course materials connect individual tasks into complete workflows. That knowledge can help readers troubleshoot problems, understand their options, and decide what to do next.

Reasoning Fuel helps the AI Assistant for Reverb 2.0 give more specific, useful answers by putting your team's knowledge to work. You upload supporting files to its Knowledge Base in WebWorks Platform, and the Assistant draws on that information alongside your published help to explain choices, suggest troubleshooting steps, and identify the settings readers need—without adding more pages to your help site.

How Reasoning Fuel Helps the Assistant Give Better Answers

The Assistant provides answers grounded in your content. Its Knowledge Base holds two types of content:

• Grounding Knowledge comes from your published help and is generated by ePublisher. It provides source material for answers, with links back to the published pages.
• Reasoning Fuel consists of additional files you prepare and upload to the same Knowledge Base. The Assistant uses them when answering questions, but the files themselves are never published or linked from an answer.

A published topic might explain how to configure a feature. Reasoning Fuel can add the reasoning behind those steps: when to choose one setting over another, which conditions affect the result, or what to check if something doesn't work as expected. Those details help the Assistant give answers readers can act on.

Put Existing Knowledge to Use

Start with material your team already uses to explain the product and solve customer problems.

Content	How It Can Improve Answers
Recurring support answers	Adds symptoms, relevant conditions, and steps for resolving common problems
Tips and workarounds	Explains what to try, when it applies, and any limitations
Course and onboarding materials	Connects individual features and tasks into a broader workflow
Product design explanations	Helps answer why a feature behaves a certain way or a setting has a particular default
Reference notes on settings and names	Supplies exact values, identifiers, and relationships for more precise guidance

Some of this information may also belong in your published help. Reasoning Fuel gives you a place for supporting detail that doesn't fit naturally into a focused topic.

The files need enough context to be useful beyond their original purpose. A support answer may depend on details from an earlier conversation, and a workaround may apply only to certain versions. Include those conditions so the Assistant can use the information appropriately.

A More Specific Answer in Practice

We use Reasoning Fuel with the Assistant in our own ePublisher documentation. One file covers Reverb 2.0 customization and connects parts of the page to the settings that control them:

TOC sidebar width: $menu_width in _sizes.scss (default 350px)

A reader may ask, "How do I make the table of contents wider?" without knowing the setting's name. With this file in its Knowledge Base, the Assistant can name the exact variable and file instead of giving general guidance about where styles are set.

In our internal testing, the Assistant identified the exact settings far more often after we added the Reasoning Fuel. That's the benefit: a more specific answer that helps the reader make the change.

Keep the Language Connected with a Glossary

Readers, product interfaces, and internal teams don't always use the same words. A glossary added as Reasoning Fuel connects those terms and explains distinctions between concepts that might otherwise be confused.

Define your product's terms, include the alternatives readers use, and identify the preferred wording for answers. For example, if readers call your table of contents a "navigation panel," the glossary can make that connection clear.

Use the same terms in your other Reasoning Fuel files and in your published help, so the glossary and the content agree. This helps the Assistant connect readers' questions to the right information and explain it consistently.

Unpublished, but Not Confidential

Reasoning Fuel files aren't published or linked from answers, but the Assistant can share their contents with any reader.

Before uploading a file, review it as if a customer were reading it. Remove customer names, confidential details, and internal commentary that isn't appropriate for your audience. Keep the useful explanation and the context needed to apply it.

Start Small and Check the Results

You can start with a few answers your team already has. Choose questions that come up regularly, make sure the answers are clear, and add a glossary to connect the terminology.

Ask the same questions before and after adding the files to see where the answers improve. If an answer needs more detail or clarification, update the relevant content and test again.

As your product changes, keep the files current so the Assistant continues to draw on accurate guidance.

Get Started

Your team already has knowledge that can help readers get more from your documentation. Reasoning Fuel puts that knowledge to work in the answers they receive.

See Optimize Your AI Assistant's Answers for guidance on preparing and testing Reasoning Fuel. If you're setting up your first Assistant, follow Set Up a Reverb 2.0 Target and AI Assistant.

You can also try the Assistant in our ePublisher documentation. Ask a question about customizing Reverb 2.0 output to see how we use Reasoning Fuel in our own help.