Documents

Enrich your articles with external content

Documents are an entirely optional, but incredibly powerful part of the Custom Articles feature.

They allow you to do two things:

• Knowledge Enrich your articles with knowledge from sources that Byword may not have access to (whitepapers, internal knowledge bases, specific videos or podcasts).

• Writing Style Tailor Byword's tone of voice based on samples (similar to our pre-existing Custom Styles feature).

The basic process for using documents is to:

1. Choose which of the above document types you'd like to use.

2. Create the document by uploading a file, or linking to an external source.

3. Attach documents to your projects, when you go to generate them.

We'll now break down these steps in more detail, and see how you can use documents in action.

Creating a Document

To create a document, head to the document creation screen.

There, you'll be asked to give your document a name (just so you can identify it) and choose a document type.

We'll use a Knowledge document, but the steps are identical for a Writing Style document

Next, you'll be asked to choose your document source:

There are five options to choose from here:

File

This lets you upload a text-based file, either a PDF or a Word DOCX document. Byword will then scan the document and save it to its database. There is a maximum file limit of 20 megabytes. This should be perfectly fine for most files, but could require compression if your files contain rich media.

Audio

This option allows you to upload a variety of different audio file formats. After uploading, Byword will then transcribe and process the text, saving the result into its database.

This option comes with a 50 megabyte file limit. While there is technically no limit on audio length, Byword will only ever look at the first hour of audio within a file.

Video

This source option lets you input a YouTube video URL. Byword will then scrape the video's audio, transcribe it, and save it to the database.

There is no strict limit on video length, however Byword will only look at the first hour of a video's audio.

It's important to make sure that your YouTube URL is the raw URL, without parameters or timestamps added. A good URL should look something like the below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

URL

Input a URL, and have Byword scrape its content. You'll be able to see the results of Byword's scrape in real-time, and even be able to edit the content that's retrieved from the URL.

Note that this is designed for text-heavy URLs (this is a good example). You should not use this feature to input site homepages, listings, or directories. This is because Byword will scrape only the URL given, and will not follow links on that page.

You should also consider that, given Byword runs on LLMs which are trained on billions of pages of internet data, there is never a need to use Knowledge documents scraped from popular sites like Wikipedia. Put simply, Byword already knows what's on there!

Good use cases include:

• URLs with recent information, that Byword won't have been trained on.

• Niche URLs, with information specific to your site's content, and which Byword likely won't know about.

Text

Last but not least, this option lets you simply input a block of plain text for Byword to process. Simple!

Once you've chosen your source, followed the relevant steps, and checked for any errors, you're good to go. Hit the button at the bottom of the page to save the document to your account.

You'll then be taken back to the Custom Articles dashboard, and should see your new document near the bottom of the screen.

Note that some document sources (videos, audio files, and any longer text-based source) may take a moment to process. These will all finish within 5 minutes (and usually only take 1 or 2) or will time out and return an error message. You can click on the error (the red triangle) to see more details.

Using Documents

Once you have one or more documents in your account, with a green tick next to them (as in the image above), you'll be able to use them when you generate articles from a template.

On the generation screen, you'll notice the ability to attach documents, once you've mapped your variables:

In the screenshot above we're telling Byword that we'd like to use the first two documents for the articles being generated in this project:

• Podcast Upload has a Knowledge document type, and so will be used to inform the content of our articles.

• My Writing Style has a Writing Style document type, and so will influence the style in which the article is written.

You can currently attach up to 3 documents to each project.

When you're ready to go and have filled in the rest of your settings, you can hit the Generate Articles button.