# Answers from your own documents

> How we build an assistant on Databricks that answers from your own manuals, shows the page it used, and searches only what each person may see.

Canonical: https://www.techfabric.com/videos/rag-on-databricks
Video: https://www.techfabric.com/blog-media/video/rag-on-databricks/explainer.mp4
Captions: https://www.techfabric.com/blog-media/video/rag-on-databricks/captions.vtt
Duration: 2:16

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An assistant on Databricks can answer your people's questions from your own manuals and procedures, show the page it used, and search only what each person is allowed to see. We build these from the questions your people actually ask, carry each document's permissions into the index, and answer questions about numbers from the system that owns them. One of our senior engineers will show you what one would answer over your documents.

The plant, manual and figures are illustrative.

## Transcript

### 0:00 What this is about

Most companies already have the answers their people need, in manuals, procedures and old tickets nobody can search. Plenty have tried a chatbot over them, and many of those pilots stall the first time it quotes a document someone wasn't allowed to see. This is how an assistant on Databricks finds the right page and keeps to the rules.

### 0:21 One number in a 412 page manual

On the night shift, a technician needs the torque setting for a pump seal on Line 3. It's somewhere in a four hundred page manual, two revisions old, and the engineer who knew it by heart retired last spring.

### 0:36 Why a general chatbot guesses

A general chatbot will answer anyway. It has never read your manual, so it gives a confident number from somewhere else, and nobody on the floor can tell the difference.

### 0:47 Find the passage, then answer

So the assistant looks before it answers. The manuals go into Unity Catalog, ai_parse_document reads the text and the tables out of every page, and an AI Search index keeps up on its own whenever someone revises a manual.

### 1:03 Every answer shows its page

The answer comes back with the manual and the page it used, so the technician can check it in a few seconds before touching the pump.

### 1:13 Who sees which documents

Then there's who sees what. Unity Catalog decides who can search the index at all. The index won't hide one document from one person by itself, though, so we tag every passage with its site and role, and filter on that for every search.

### 1:28 Tested on real questions

And before anyone on the floor relies on it, we score it on real questions with known answers, using MLflow's judges, and score it again every time the model, the prompt or the index changes.

### 1:42 What we build

That's what we build, and it's where most of these projects stall. We start from the questions people really ask, carry each source's permissions into the index, and answer questions about numbers from the system that owns them, with the query on screen. If your people spend their nights searching PDFs, tell us which documents they search most, and one of our senior engineers will show you what an assistant over them would answer.

### 2:10 Answers from your own documents

We're a Databricks partner, with 80 Databricks-certified engineers.

## Related

- [AI chatbots and enterprise search that respect access](https://www.techfabric.com/ai/chatbots-enterprise-search)
- [Row filters and agent identity in Unity Catalog](https://www.techfabric.com/blog/unity-catalog-agent-identity-row-filters-databricks)
- [Fabric: hybrid retrieval with the source behind every answer](https://www.techfabric.com/case-studies/fabric-pro)
