What is an embedding?
An embedding is a numerical representation of text that captures its meaning, allowing passages with similar meaning to be found even when they share no words.
Embeddings are why an AI representative can answer "do you deliver to Berlin?" from a page that only says "we ship across the EU". Text is converted to vectors, and similar meaning lands close together.
Why it matters
Keyword search fails on paraphrase, which is how customers actually write. Embeddings make retrieval robust to phrasing, which is the difference between a bot that usually finds the answer and one that usually doesn't.
Examples
- "Refund window" retrieving a page that says "you have 30 days to return".
- A question in Spanish retrieving relevant English content.
- Grouping near-duplicate customer questions to spot repeats.
Related
term
What is RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)?
RAG is what separates a chatbot that knows your business from one that guesses. Documents are split into passages and indexed by meaning; each question retrieves the closest passages, and the model is instructed to answer only from them.
term
What is a knowledge base?
Traditionally a knowledge base is a help centre humans read. For AI support it is the source material a representative answers from — which means an ordinary website, well written, can serve as one without a separate help centre.
term
What is RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)?
RAG is what separates a chatbot that knows your business from one that guesses. Documents are split into passages and indexed by meaning; each question retrieves the closest passages, and the model is instructed to answer only from them.
guide
How to train AI on your website content
"Training on your website" almost never means training a model. It means crawling your pages, splitting them into passages, indexing them by meaning, and retrieving the right ones at question time. Understanding that distinction tells you exactly what to fix when answers are wrong.
comparison
RAG vs fine-tuning
Fine-tuning teaches a model a style or behaviour by changing its weights. Retrieval-augmented generation puts your actual documents in front of it at question time. For keeping business facts current and citable, retrieval is the right tool — and updating means re-crawling, not re-training.
RubyRep is this, applied to your website.
Give it your URL and it reads your pages, then answers your customers from them.
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