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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 the Audience's Ask tab. When you are current (every lesson finished, nothing overdue for review), Ask is where you land by default. When you still have learning to do, Hub is home and Ask is one tab away.
  2. Type your question in the composer.
  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.

As an owner

While you work Curriculum or People, a compact Ask field stays at the bottom of the Audience so you can probe the knowledge without leaving the owner tabs. It starts collapsed; open it to type. One answer shows at a time there. Questions has no footer field — its ask sits on the page itself, below the questions waiting for you.

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 Questions 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.

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.

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 Ask and get clarification grounded in your team's actual documentation
  • Follow up — On Ask, stay in the thread so a follow-up like "what about pricing?" resolves against what was already discussed