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Asking Questions

This page explains how to use Mention's grounded Q&A to ask questions while you learn.

What is grounded Q&A?

You can ask questions about your Audience's material in your own words. Mention generates answers that are grounded in your organization's source documents — the same documents your admin connected to the platform.

This means answers are accurate, relevant to your organization, and traceable back to real documentation rather than generic information.

How to ask a question

As a learner

  1. Open Chat from the Audience's sidebar — it is where you land when you open the Audience.
  2. Type your question in the composer. An empty thread offers the questions this Audience asks most that already have an answer on record, each labelled with its topic. Tapping one shows the recorded answer immediately — no waiting, no credits — and the thread continues from there like any other conversation.
  3. Submit it. The answer appears in the thread, with a strip of the sources it drew on — the strip appears when an answer was found and drew on sources. Ask again in the same thread to follow up — Mention keeps the earlier turns as context, the same way Slack thread follow-ups work.

Tap a cited source to see which document it is (with the provider it came from and where it sits) and the specific facts behind the answer.

If an answer looks out of date or wrong, use Flag as outdated beneath it. The flag records which facts the answer was built on, so the team can see where the sources have drifted.

As an owner

Owners ask the same way: open Chat from the Audience's sidebar. The conversation is grounded in the same sources your learners' answers draw on, so it doubles as a way to probe what the Audience's knowledge can and cannot answer.

Scoping

An answer is grounded in the whole Audience's source material, not just the article you happened to be reading. You can ask about anything the Audience covers.

This means you can ask a question from any ask surface and get an answer that spans several articles, rather than one limited to the document in front of you.

What answers look like

Answers are concise, well-formatted text grounded in your organization's sources. Occasionally an answer includes one small interactive widget — a stepper, a reveal, a decision tree, tabs, a timeline, or a flow diagram — when interaction genuinely helps explain the answer.

What happens with your questions

Your questions aren't visible to other members, but they are tracked by the platform. Every ask is recorded against the question it matches, and questions Mention couldn't answer are surfaced to the owners of that Audience, on its Gaps tab, so they can fill the gap — and they can see who asked. Mention groups similar questions together and counts how often each is asked, so something several people ask gets attention sooner.

Some questions are answered before you ask them. When your Audience was created, Mention wrote the questions its members would likely need and answered the ones your sources supported. Ask a question your organization has already answered — one of those, or one somebody settled since — and the recorded answer comes back instantly, with its citations, rather than being generated afresh; if an owner has turned that question into a lesson, the answer points you onward to the article too. A served answer is labelled with the question it was recorded under, so you can tell when your phrasing was matched to one asked before — and rephrase if that's not what you meant. See Topics and Questions.

When an admin answers one of these, Mention keeps that answer as part of your organization's knowledge, so the next person to ask gets a real answer. Asking that same question again is also a second chance at it: if the fresh retrieval comes up empty, Mention re-answers from the facts behind the stored answer rather than giving up. You get an answer written for the question you actually asked, and if the knowledge no longer supports one, the question goes back to the Audience's owners as a gap instead.

When you know the answer

In Slack, a question Mention couldn't answer comes with an I know this button — on its reply, and on gaps posted into an Audience's own channel. Click it, write the answer, and Mention takes it from there. You don't have to own the Audience: if you do, the answer is recorded immediately; if you don't, it's held as a proposal for an owner to approve. Either way the knowledge is captured where the question came up, instead of being lost in a thread reply.

Tips for good questions

  • Be specific — Ask about a particular aspect of the material rather than broad questions
  • Reference the content — Frame your question in terms of what you just read
  • Ask when confused — If part of an article is unclear, open Chat and get clarification grounded in your team's actual documentation
  • Follow up — On Chat, stay in the thread so a follow-up like "what about pricing?" resolves against what was already discussed