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How Mention Works

Mention turns your organization's existing documentation into an answer to the same question your whole company keeps asking in different words: what are we building, and where does it stand?

It does that in two registers. Articles carry the durable knowledge — how something works, why the rule exists, what to do in the awkward case — and each one becomes a lesson so the material is known rather than skimmed. Answers carry the volatile part — ship dates, current status, prices — stored against the question they answer, cited back to the facts behind them, and marked stale on their own when those facts move.

On top of both sits the part that keeps a company aligned: every question anyone asks is recorded once for your whole organization, answered from your own material where it can be, and filed under the topic it belongs to. What your sources cannot answer stays open, in one place, for the person who can settle it. See Topics and Questions.

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. Everything you activate is open to every Audience unless you restrict a repository, channel, space, or folder to the Audiences that should see it (see Source Access).

Sources keep themselves current: where the provider supports it Mention is told as content changes and re-reads just what moved, and every integration reconciles on a daily sync behind that. You can also trigger a manual sync at any time.

As it reads, Mention also builds your organization's glossary: the terms your sources actually use, each defined from those mentions. The terms labelled Topic are the ones the rest of the company asks about, so they join early — at two mentions rather than five — and they are what grounds the questions Mention seeds for each new Audience.

2. Ask

Each Audience — a group of team members who need the same body of knowledge — has an owner, and that owner says what the group needs answered.

An Audience is created from a handful of questions in the owner's own words, prefilled with a few obvious ones you are free to replace. Mention searches your sources with each question as written and proposes the Audience's Contents from what it finds — the articles this readership is told, grouped under the topic each one explains. Every entry is

  • 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. Ask for what stays true: a ship date or a current price belongs on the answer surface, which knows when it has gone stale, rather than in a document that will quietly age.

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 in Conflicts. Conflicts that fall outside any Audience are surfaced in the Source conflicts tab of the org-wide Conflicts, 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.

Running alongside: the product story

The three phases are how material becomes knowledge. Alongside them, Mention keeps the part of that knowledge with a shelf life.

Every question anyone asks is recorded once, for your whole organization, with per-audience counts of how often and by how many people. Mention answers what your sources support. And when an Audience is created, Mention seeds up to ten questions its members will need answered, keeps the ones your sources can answer as ready inventory, and quietly discards the rest — so the obvious answers are waiting before anybody asks.

What comes back is one of two things, and the honest one is the point:

  • Answered — with when it was answered and how many of your facts it cites. It files under its topic, where anyone in the Audience can read it, and asking it again is served the recorded answer instantly. An answer whose facts later move is marked stale and re-answered from current knowledge.
  • Open — your sources do not cover it. It waits on the Audience's Gaps tab, showing how many people have asked, so the most-wanted one is the obvious one to fill first.

Every open question was asked by a real person, and asks accumulate on it and move it up the queue. See Topics and Questions.

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.
  • It answers before it is asked. When an Audience is created, Mention writes the questions its members will need answered and answers what your sources support, so the obvious ones are ready on day one — and it discards the rest rather than surfacing noise.
  • 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. An answer whose facts moved says it is stale rather than repeating itself.
  • 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