How to train your Taros assistant for best results
Practical tips for getting the most out of your AI assistant's training — from crawling the right pages to weighting your best content.
Your AI assistant is only as good as the content you train it on. Here's how to set it up for accurate, helpful answers from day one.
Know your training methods
Taros gives you three ways to feed knowledge into your assistant:
1. Website crawl — point it at a URL and let it read one page or your entire site. Available on all plans.
2. Document uploads — upload PDFs, Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint files, or plain text. Available on Basic and Pro.
3. Manual Q&A pairs — type in a question and the ideal answer. Available on Pro. These get a 3x priority boost in search results, making them your most powerful training tool.
You don't have to pick one. The best results come from combining all three.
Start small
Don't crawl your entire site on day one. Start with the pages that matter most:
- Your FAQ or help center
- Shipping and returns policy
- Pricing page
- Top 5-10 product pages
This gives you a focused knowledge base you can test quickly. Once you're happy with the quality, expand to a full-site crawl.
Use manual Q&A for the gaps
After your assistant has been live for a few days, check your chat logs and analytics. Look for:
- Questions the assistant couldn't answer
- Questions where the answer was technically correct but not helpful
- Common phrasing your customers use that differs from your website copy
For each of these, add a manual Q&A pair. Because manual pairs get a 3x priority boost, the assistant will prefer these answers over crawled content. This is your fastest path to better quality.
Document uploads for detailed content
Some content doesn't live on your website. Think:
- Detailed product specifications
- Internal policies and procedures
- Shipping rate tables
- Warranty terms
- Size guides
Upload these as documents. Taros supports PDF, Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx), PowerPoint (.pptx), and plain text (.txt) files.
Example: training for a webshop
Let's walk through a typical e-commerce setup.
Step 1: Crawl your key pages. Start with your FAQ page, shipping info page, returns policy, and your top-selling product categories. Use single-page crawl for each to keep it targeted.
Step 2: Upload your shipping policy PDF. If you have a detailed document with rates by region, weight limits, and delivery times, upload it directly. The assistant can reference specific details that might not be on your website.
Step 3: Add manual Q&A for common questions. These are the questions your support team answers every day:
- "Where is my order?" → "You can track your order using the tracking link in your shipping confirmation email. If you haven't received a confirmation, check your spam folder or contact us with your order number."
- "Can I change my order?" → "We can modify orders within 1 hour of placement. After that, the order enters processing and can't be changed. Contact us immediately if you need to make changes."
- "Do you ship internationally?" → "Yes, we ship to all EU countries. Shipping rates and delivery times vary by destination — check our shipping page for details."
Step 4: Test with real questions. Use the Test Bot feature and ask the questions your customers actually ask. Not "what is your shipping policy" but "how long until I get my stuff" and "I ordered 3 days ago where is it."
Use priority weighting wisely
Every data source in Taros has a priority weight that affects how much the AI favors it during search:
- Manual Q&A: 3.0x — highest priority, use for your most important answers
- FAQ pages: 1.5x–2.0x — boost your most authoritative content
- General pages: 1.0x — default weight, fine for supplementary content
- Large document dumps: 0.5x–1.0x — lower priority for broad reference material
The idea is simple: content you've carefully written and verified should outrank content that was bulk-imported.
Keep it fresh
Your website changes. Your policies update. New products launch. Your training data needs to keep up.
- Re-crawl your website whenever you make significant content changes
- Review unanswered questions in your analytics weekly and add new Q&A pairs
- Update document uploads when policies or specs change
- Remove outdated sources that reference old products, discontinued services, or expired promotions
Test before going live
Before embedding the widget on your site, use the Test Bot feature in your dashboard. Ask it:
- Your 10 most common customer questions
- Edge cases and tricky questions
- Questions phrased the way real customers write (informal, typos, incomplete sentences)
If the answers are accurate and on-brand, you're ready to go live. If not, add more training data for the gaps and test again.
The goal isn't perfection on day one. It's getting the basics right and improving steadily from there.