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How Mention Works

Mention turns your organization's existing documentation into the articles your team actually needs — and into the lessons that make the material stick. Instead of asking anyone to write training material from scratch, you say what each team needs to know and Mention writes it from the documents you already have.

The three phases

1. Ingest

You start by connecting your content sources. Mention supports integrations with Notion, Confluence, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, GitHub, Slack, Intercom, and Microsoft Teams — plus files you upload directly. See Integrations for the full list.

Once connected, Mention syncs with the source and shows you a list of available documents. You choose which ones to activate — these are the documents Mention analyzes, and the only material it will ever write from.

Sources sync automatically on a daily basis to pick up new and updated content. You can also trigger a manual sync at any time.

2. Ask

Each Audience — a group of team members who need the same body of knowledge — has an owner, and that owner writes its table of contents.

A table of contents is a list of entries. Each entry is two things:

  • a name, which members see in their contents list, and
  • a prompt, which says what the article should cover: "write me an overview of how refunds are approved."

That is the whole authoring surface. You are commissioning articles, not drafting them.

As Mention analyzes your material it also checks for contradictions — cases where sources make conflicting claims. Each detected contradiction is routed to the Audience whose owners are best placed to settle it — the Audience of the member who said one side on a call, or the one whose described area covers the subject — and its owners decide it on that Audience's Questions tab. Conflicts that fall outside any Audience are surfaced under Sources → Contradictions, where admins review them side by side, pick the correct version, and suppress the conflicting one. This directly improves the accuracy of the articles Mention writes. See Reviewing Contradictions and Reviewing Misunderstandings.

3. Learn

Mention writes each entry into an article — a single markdown document grounded in your activated sources — and then composes that article's lesson: 5 to 9 exercises the member works through by attempting things.

Members open the audience and work through its lessons. Every exercise is a setup, their attempt, and then the correction — nothing is revealed before they commit, because being told the answer after you have committed to one is what makes it stick. A lesson is open book: each exercise offers the passage of the article it was written from, because finding the right material and applying it is part of the job. Once the lesson is finished, the entry opens the article instead. Material they have passed comes back for review on a fixed schedule — closed book that time — so knowledge stays current instead of being something they once had.

If your sources do not cover what an entry asks for, Mention says so. The article comes back not ready, with a one-line reason, rather than an invented answer. That is a normal state, and a signal to connect more material or narrow the entry.

What makes Mention different

  • Your content stays where it is. Mention connects to your existing tools. You never have to migrate documentation into a new system.
  • You say what matters; Mention writes it. A name and a prompt per topic is the whole authoring job. The lesson follows from the article with nothing extra to commission.
  • It asks before it tells. Learning happens through graded attempts, not a checkbox, so the number on the dashboard is a measurement rather than a self-report.
  • It tells you when it can't. An article Mention cannot ground in your sources comes back not ready, with a reason, instead of a confident guess.
  • Content is scoped to teams. Not everyone needs to know everything. Audiences ensure each member sees only what is relevant to their role.

What Mention does not claim

Passing a lesson means the member met the criteria for the material it grades, against the article Mention wrote from your sources. It is a real signal and a much better one than a checkbox, but it is not a certification, and it is only ever as good as the article behind it — which is why the article is rewritten when its sources move, and the lesson follows.

Adoption also measures two different things and they are worth keeping apart: a member is complete when they have finished every lesson in an audience, and current when nothing they passed is overdue for review. See Monitoring Progress.

Next steps