Handbooks serve as valuable tools for sharing essential information, policies, and guidelines to employees. Depending on the subject matter, these handbooks can contain a substantial amount of content. We want to ensure that no critical information is overlooked or challenging to locate and outline below how we can help employees with swift and convenient access to handbooks, whether in their entirety or through specific excerpts.

📓 Handbook Digest

A digest of a handbook refers to a condensed or summarized version of the contents found in a larger, more comprehensive handbook or manual. The purpose of creating a digest is to provide a quick and easily digestible overview of the key information, concepts, and instructions contained in the full handbook.

Here's why you might find digests useful:

Accessibility: Handbooks can often be lengthy and contain a lot of detailed information. A digest makes the content more accessible to a wider audience by offering a concise version that is easier to read and understand.

Quick Reference: A digest serves as a handy reference guide for employees who don't want to go through the entire handbook every time they need to look up specific information. It allows them to quickly find the key points they need.

Training and Orientation: Digests are useful in training programs or during employee orientations. They provide newcomers with an overview of important policies, procedures, or guidelines without overwhelming them with the full handbook.

To create a digest of a handbook, you typically:

Identify the key sections and chapters of the handbook.
Summarize the main points, guidelines, and procedures from each section.
Focus on the most important and frequently referenced information.
Use clear and concise language to convey the information effectively.
Organize the digest in a logical and easy-to-follow structure.
Ensure that the digest retains the accuracy and relevance of the original content.

💬 Access Handbooks via Slack

Now, let's talk about a helpful feature: the Slackbot.

To access the whole content of a handbook you can ask for a specific title - or the whole library of handbook available.

If you need a quick answer or summary from your handbook you can just ask the Slackbot. It uses AI to understand your request and fetches the information you need right there in your Slack conversation. This way, you don't have to leave Slack to access your HR handbook – it's like having your handbook right at your fingertips, all thanks to AI and the Alexis platform.

Here an example how that looks like:

⚠ Possible Limitations

In the context of creating digests in Slack, there might be a token limitation to consider. A "token" in this context refers to the units of text that the AI processes. Tokens can be as short as one character or as long as one word in English, and they are what AI models like GPT use to understand and generate text.

Now, the limitation arises because AI models, including those used by Slackbots, have a maximum capacity for processing a certain number of tokens in a single request. If your handbook in Alexis is too long and contains too many tokens, the Slackbot might not be able to process it all in one go due to this limitation.

The current limit by GPT is 16.000 tokens per handbook but what does that mean in terms of number of words?

The number of words in a handbook containing roughly 16,000 tokens can vary depending on the average length of words in the text. In English, the average word length is approximately 5 characters. Therefore, you can estimate the number of words by dividing the token count by the average word length:

A handbook containing roughly 16,000 tokens would likely have approximately 3,200 words. Keep in mind that this is a rough estimate, and the actual word count can vary based on the specific content and language used in the handbook.

, it's important to be aware that very long handbooks might need to be broken down into smaller sections or chapters when using AI-powered Slackbots for digest requests. This way, you can ensure that the AI can effectively generate the digest without hitting token limitations.

Some tips

For us it is most important that you can create handbooks your way! We don't want to limit you from creating content and handbooks. For also utilizing Slack and AI to continue generate accurate digests we recommend to

create handbooks that are as short as but relevant as possible
frequently revisit the content of a handbook to see if you want to update or remove outdate information