Exploring Notion AI Q&A: Your New Workspace Companion - Guide to Notion AI Q&A

Technology

Nov 24

Chatbots have undergone many iterations over the past decades. From simplistic pattern-recognition machines to general and tool-specific knowledge bases to naturally interact with. Notion Q&A is a chatbot, in its essence. In particular, it is a chatbot that can only reference information across your Notion workspace. Anything outside of your Notion workspace is not accessible to Notion Q&A. This differentiates it from more general-purpose chatbots like Open AI’s ChatGPT, for example. Therefore, Notion Q&A is a valuable tool for teams and individuals who want to interact with a specialized chatbot that knows the ins and outs of the information inside their digital workspace, instead of retrieving general knowledge from a broader data set whose inputs can’t be controlled by the user.

Notion Q&A may be a valid tool for helping team members onboard on your team, or optimize your asynchronous work environment by providing people with a way to find answers to common questions they have been documented in your Notion workspace. At the foundation of Notion Q&A is your workspace content. If you do not have a well-organized workspace rich in content that can pull answers to common questions from your team members, Notion AI Q&A may not be a useful tool for you just yet. It is key to work on the foundations of your Notion workspace before being able to benefit from Notion Q&A’s potential, because without content there is no potential.

What is Notion Q&A

If, instead, you already have a solid structure within your Notion workspace with lots of content that can be used to retrieve useful answers for yourself and your team, then Notion AI Q&A is a tool worth considering in your repertoire. If you already have Notion AI in your workspace plan, Notion AI Q&A is included in it and you will already see it available in your workspace. Otherwise, purchasing a Notion AI add-on to your Notion workspace will also unlock Notion AI Q&A for you and your team.

Notion AI Q&A can only answer questions based on the content each specific user has access to. It respects the permission settings in your workspace pages and databases. It currently works best with page content, instead of database content. For example, asking the question “Which tasks are overdue in our Tasks database?” or “What tasks were completed last week?” will very likely not provide accurate answers at the moment.

Features

The feature set and capabilities of Notion AI Q&A will likely expand over time as the tool gets refined by Notion. Currently, these are the key features of the tool.

Ask any question in a conversational manner
Due to its chatbot nature, Notion AI Q&A can reply to your queries conversationally. You can follow up on your questions to receive more specific details, for example, or ask additional separate questions as part of the same chat conversation. This is in line with the experience you may have with other chatbots or the most glorified chatbot of our current times, ChatGPT.
Retrieve the sources of the answers
When providing answers to your queries, Notion AI Q&A gives the sources where it got the answers. These are pages in your Notion workspace where Notion AI found relevant points to answer your questions. You can click on those pages to access them directly and dive deeper into their content.
Provide feedback on the answers to improve the model
When receiving an answer from Notion AI Q&A, you can react with a thumbs up or down depending on the quality of the answer. This refines the model to account for your feedback and reinforces the pattern used in the answer process if you gave it a thumbs up, or change tactics in the case of a thumbs down.

Current limitations

Hallucinations
Based on my experience, Notion AI Q&A sometimes hallucinates (i.e., provides made-up or completely wrong answers) on questions that can be answered with content present in your Notion workspace. The hallucination problem is a broad issue in the LLMs (large language models) world at large. It will likely get better through user feedback and data points that allow to improve the model behind Notion AI Q&A.
It cannot reference dynamic data
For example, if you are in your “Tasks” database in Notion and you mention the “current page” in the Notion AI Q&A chat interface, the chatbot will not understand what the “current page” is as of November 2023. Notion AI Q&A works as a global agent across your workspace and always considers all the pages in the workspace that you can access when answering your questions. Following this underlying principle, you are not able to reference a specific block of text on a page or ask relative questions on database data (e.g., “tasks completed last week” or similar queries).

How to use Notion Q&A

Finally, with all the theory aside, you may start using Notion AI Q&A at any time in your Notion workspace if you are already subscribed to Notion AI. Otherwise, you can sign up for Notion AI and you will be added to the waitlist (as of November 2023) for Notion AI Q&A. Very soon Notion AI Q&A will be released directly as part of the Notion AI subscription without any waitlist. Here is the official landing page with all the information.

When Notion AI Q&A is active in your workspace, you can access it in two ways: