Lens helps your customers get answers about your product. It finds the right answer in your own content and gives it to them, wherever they ask.
Most companies have product information spread across lots of places, like a help center, product guides, training courses, and PDFs. Lens brings it all together, so customers get the same right answer whether they ask on your website, inside your product, or in an AI tool like ChatGPT.
Best of all, Lens works with the content you already have, so there's nothing to move or rebuild. Lens is made by Thought Industries, but you don't need any other Thought Industries product to use it.
Use Case Information
If your product information lives in a bunch of different places and it's hard to keep it all up to date, Lens brings it together so you're not fixing the same answer in five places. If customers get different answers depending on where they look, Lens gives everyone the same one.
If you'd like customers to get help right inside your product instead of opening a support ticket, or you want AI tools like ChatGPT to describe your product correctly, Lens does that too. Your own sales, support, and success teams can use it to find answers fast.
How It Works
Think of Lens as a helper that studies everything your company has written about your product, then uses only that to answer your customers' questions.
- You show Lens where your information lives. This might be your website, your help center, or files like PDFs. Each of these is called a knowledge source.
- Lens reads everything and puts it in one place. It figures out what each page is about and how the pieces fit together. This one place is called your knowledge layer. You don't have to sort or label anything yourself.
- Customers ask questions, and Lens answers. Lens finds the right information in your knowledge layer and uses only that to answer. Each answer shows where the information came from. If Lens can't find the answer, it says so instead of guessing.
- You choose where Lens shows up. The most common place is a small chat window on your website, called a widget. Lens can also answer inside AI tools your team uses, like Claude, and help public AI tools like ChatGPT find your content. Each of these places is called a channel.
- You see what people ask. Lens keeps track of the questions people ask so you can see what's working. If an answer is wrong or missing, you know exactly what content to fix or add.
An example
A customer is on your website and wants to know if your product works on their phone. They open the chat window and type their question. Lens checks your help center, product guides, and PDFs, finds the answer, and replies in seconds. It also shows which pages the answer came from.
Terms You'll See
Here's a quick list of the words you'll see in Lens, all in one place.
- Source: Any place Lens learns from, like your website, your academy, your help center, or a PDF you upload.
- Knowledge layer: The one place where Lens keeps everything it learned from your knowledge sources. Every answer Lens gives comes from here.
- Channel: A place where people can ask Lens a question and get an answer. For example, the chat window on your website is one channel, and an AI tool like Claude connected to Lens is another. You can set up more than one, and each can answer from different content. There are four kinds: a widget, MCP, the API, and answer engines.
- Widget: A small chat window on your website or in your product. People type a question and get an answer.
- Source group: A set of knowledge sources you group together and give a name. Source groups let you control what each channel can answer from. For example, you could put your help center and product guides in a group called "Customer help" and connect it to the chat window on your website. Customers would then only get answers from those sources, and never from content meant just for your team, like sales materials.
- MCP: A way to connect Lens to AI tools like Claude, so those tools can answer questions using your content.
- API: A way for developers to connect Lens to their own apps and tools.
- Answer engines: Public AI tools people use to ask questions, like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Lens helps them find and use your content.
- Lens script: A small piece of code you copy and paste into your website. It's what makes Lens show up on your site.
- Interaction: One question someone asks Lens, plus the answer they get.
- Workspace: Your own separate area in Lens, with its own content, channels, and teammates. You might use a second workspace to keep things completely apart, like for two different brands.
Next Steps
New to Lens? You can sign up for free and try it with your own content. Then follow the Quick Start guide to connect your content and add a widget to your website.
Already using Thought Industries Academy? You can add your academy as a knowledge source using the Thought Industries source type, so your courses help answer customer questions too.
Tip
See Quick Start: Set Up Lens and Navigating the Lens Console.
FAQs
No. Lens is a separate product with its own sign-in. You can use it with or without Academy. If you already use Academy, nothing about your academy changes.
Most chatbots are tied to one tool and only know what's inside it, like your help center. Lens learns from all of your knowledge sources at once and gives the same answer everywhere, so your website, your product, and AI tools don't give customers different answers.
Most likely. If you can add a small piece of code to a page, you can add Lens to it. That includes marketing sites, blogs, help centers, communities, and the inside of your product.