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Knowledge base

The knowledge base is a structured repository for information about your text. Store key facts about people, locations, events, etc. to make sure your writing stays consistent.

The knowledge base also feeds into the AI features: when you ask the assistant about a character, request a continuation, or brainstorm a scene, the AI draws on your knowledge base to keep its output consistent with your story.

Entities​

Each record in the knowledge base is an entity. There are five entity types — Person, Location, Organisation, Event, and Custom — each with its own icon and color. The entity list can be filtered by type.

An entity has the following fields:

  • Name — the primary identifier. If the field is empty, the AI can generate a fitting name for you (1 credit)
  • Aliases — comma-separated alternative names, e.g. "Elizabeth", "Liz", "The Queen". Aliases help ShyEditor recognize the entity in your text no matter what you call it
  • Summary — a free-text description
  • Type — Person, Location, Organisation, Event, or Custom
  • Traits — key-value pairs, each with a label and a description. Every entity type comes with a set of trait templates (for example, a Person has Personality, Background, Physical Description, Dialogue Style, Occupation, Mannerisms, and Role in the story), and you can add your own custom traits. If a trait description is empty, the AI can generate one based on everything it knows about the entity (1 credit)
  • Mentions — an automatically tracked list of every place the entity appears in your writing, grouped by sheet, with context snippets. Click any mention to jump straight to that passage in the editor

Generating entities with AI​

You can generate an entirely new entity from the knowledge base: provide a short text description, select an entity type, and the AI generates a name plus descriptions for each trait in the type's template. This costs 1 credit per generated field (the name and each trait).

You can also generate entities from the assistant chat or through the knowledge base brainstorm mode.

Auto-population​

Instead of building the knowledge base by hand, you can let the AI do it for you. Auto-population reads your entire project, identifies the characters, locations, organizations, and events in it, merges entities that are referred to by different names, and fills in their summaries and traits.

The results are presented for review — you can expand individual entities to inspect them before accepting, or accept everything at once. Auto-population costs 15 AI credits.

tip

ShyEditor can also suggest entities automatically as you write — see Advice.