Overview of Alice and 11X - 11X is building digital workers for the go-to-market organization, including Alice, an AI SDR, and Julian, a voice agent [2] - Alice sends approximately 50,000 emails per day, significantly more than a human SDR's 20-50 emails, and runs campaigns for about 300 business organizations [6] - The knowledge base centralizes seller information, allowing users to upload source material for message generation [18] Technical Architecture and Pipeline - The knowledge base pipeline consists of parsing, chunking, storage, retrieval, and visualization [22] - Parsing converts non-text resources into text, making them legible to large language models [23] - Chunking breaks down markdown into semantic entities for embedding in the vector DB, preserving markdown structure [37][38] - Pinecone was selected as the vector database due to its well-known solution, cloud hosting, ease of use, bundled embedding models, and customer support [46][47][48][49] - A deep research agent, built using Leta, is used for retrieval, creating a plan with one or many context retrieval steps [51][52] Vendor Selection and Considerations - The company chose to work with vendors for parsing, prioritizing speed to market and confidence in outcome over building in-house [26][27] - Llama Parse was selected for documents and images due to its support for numerous file types and support [32] - Firecrawl was chosen for websites due to familiarity and the availability of their crawl endpoint [33][34] - Cloudglue was selected for audio and video because it supports both formats and extracts information from the video itself [36] Lessons Learned and Future Plans - RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) is complex, requiring many micro-decisions and technology evaluations [58] - The company recommends getting to production first before benchmarking and improving [59] - Future plans include tracking and addressing hallucinations, evaluating parsing vendors on accuracy and completeness, experimenting with hybrid RAG, and reducing costs [60][61]