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Configure Content Assistant in DocuShare 8.1

Updated

Applies to: Xerox DocuShare 8.1 with a Content Assistant subscription 

Overview

Content Assistant provides AI-assisted search, document analysis, summarization, automatic classification, data extraction, and AI-based OCR.

Content Assistant requires a separate Xerox subscription and Normalized Page Packs. The subscription is provisioned in the Content Assistant cloud tenant; administrators do not configure the page packs in the DocuShare administration UI.

Document text is sent to the Content Assistant cloud service for processing. Original document bytes remain in the DocuShare ContentStore. Vector representations used for search are stored in the local pgVector database.

Prerequisites

  • Contact the Xerox account team to purchase the Content Assistant subscription and Normalized Page Packs.
  • Once purchased, the provisioning team will provide the tenant identifier and API credentials.
  • Install and configure the pgVector PostgreSQL extension and AI Search database by following the separate Xerox DocuShare AI Content Assistant Search pgVector Install Guide.
  • Confirm that the DocuShare server can connect to the AI Search database.

Enable Content Assistant

  1. In Site Administration, open Content Assistant.
  2. Configure the runtime settings described in the Content Assistant Search and Advanced Settings pages.
  3. Open Site Administration > User Control Groups.
  4. Add users or groups to Content Assistant Users. Members can use AI Search, Dataset Analysis, premium models when authorized, saved sessions, and personal AI Instructions.
  5. Add users or groups to Content Assistant Editors when they must add, remove, or re-index documents and collections.
  6. Save the group changes.
  7. Index the collections that should be searchable. Indexing can be started by an authorized editor, a Content Rule, or an application.

Administrators are implicitly members of both Content Assistant groups.

Configure external knowledge

The External Knowledge setting controls whether AI Search may use external knowledge in addition to user-provided context.

  1. Open Admin > Content Assistant > Search.
  2. Locate External Knowledge.
  3. Select On to allow external knowledge, or Off to restrict responses to user-provided context.
  4. Click Save.

This setting is system-wide and has no per-user or per-collection override. Changes are recorded in the audit log.

Configure premium models

  1. Open Site Administration > Content Assistant > Premium Models.
  2. Click Add to retrieve available models from the Content Assistant cloud service.
  3. Review each model's page factor and context-window size.
  4. Select the models that users may use and click Apply.
  5. Grant premium-model access to the users or groups that need it.

Users without premium-model access continue to use the default model. Premium models may consume more Normalized Pages.

Verify the AI Search database

If AI Search does not return results for an authorized user:

  1. Inspect <DOCUSHARE_HOME>/logs/dsaiservice.stdout for connection errors.
  2. Compare the VectorDbUrl value in DSAIServerConfig.xml with a direct psql connection from the DocuShare server.
  3. Confirm that the documents table exists and contains rows.
  4. Confirm that the PostgreSQL vector extension is installed.

The AI Search database is backed up as a regular PostgreSQL database. Although embeddings can be regenerated by re-indexing, re-indexing consumes Normalized Pages, so a production backup is recommended