Summer 2025 Product Updates: Ask AI, Power User Features, and More

We've been absolutely buzzing this summer, cooking up features that make knowledge management faster, smarter, and way more fun to use. Seriously, we're pretty excited about this batch. Here's everything new at HelpDocs!

Ask AI Goes Public 🤖

Drumroll please... After months of testing (and probably too much coffee), Ask AI is now live for all our Build and Grow plan friends!

This little genius has already helped thousands of users find answers by smartly summarizing content instead of making people play hide-and-seek with information across multiple articles. We're basically giving your knowledge base a brain upgrade.

How It Works

Think of Ask AI as that incredibly helpful colleague who somehow knows exactly where everything is. It uses semantic search to understand what people actually need, then pulls relevant info from multiple sources in your knowledge base to create comprehensive answers.

Unlike traditional keyword search that's all "did you mean these exact words?", Ask AI gets context and intent. It's pretty clever that way.

The setup? Ridiculously simple: just click Enable AI in your dashboard and select Generative Search from the dropdown. Boom, done!

The nitty-gritty details:

• Pricing: Included on Build and Grow plans, credit-based system (check our pricing)
• Usage: You can set credit caps so you won't get any surprises
• Languages: Works with all our multilingual languages (we've got you covered globally!)
• Important note: It only works with your existing content—if the info doesn't exist in your knowledge base, Ask AI won't magically create it (no hallucinations here 😉)

Bulk Translate: Scale Your Multilingual Content 🌍

Remember the days of translating articles one... by... one? Yeah, we got tired just thinking about it too.

Now you can select multiple articles or entire categories and translate them all at once using machine translation. It's like having a super-powered translation assistant who never gets tired.

How It Works

The workflow is beautifully simple: select the articles you want to translate using those handy checkboxes on your content page, click Bulk Edit, then head over to the Actions tab in the side menu and click Translate.

You'll even see exactly how many credits it'll cost before you commit—no surprises here!

Perfect for the Busy Multilingual Teams

Whether you're launching in new markets (exciting!), keeping documentation current across multiple languages, or just trying to stay sane while managing tons of multilingual content, bulk translate is your new friend.

Here's the time-saving magic: before, translating a category with 20 articles meant opening 20 individual articles, navigating to translation settings, and managing each one separately. Now it's literally three clicks: select, bulk edit, translate.

We're talking hours saved per translation batch! ⏰

The details:

• Pricing: Credit-based with transparent pricing shown upfront
• Languages: All our supported languages are ready to go
• Bonus treat: If a category title hasn't been translated yet, we'll throw that in for free (because we're nice like that 🫶)

Dashboard Gets a Makeover ✨

Our dashboard was looking a bit... well, let's just say it needed some TLC. So we completely rebuilt it from the ground up! Think of it as that satisfying home renovation, but for your daily workflow.

What's Actually Different

The content layout is way tighter now, giving you much quicker access to your articles and categories. We've boosted accessibility across the board and created tons more space for category navigation. No more cramped sidebars making you feel claustrophobic!

And the biggest crowd-pleaser? Dark mode! 🌙

Whether you're burning the midnight oil or just prefer easier-on-the-eyes interfaces, you can toggle between light and dark themes in your user settings. Your retinas will thank you.

Why We Did This

Better interface design isn't just about looking pretty (though we think it does look pretty great). For teams juggling large knowledge bases, every second saved navigating the interface adds up to real, meaningful time savings. We're talking about getting back to your actual work faster.

Enforce Category Permissions: Control Access at Scale 🔒

Setting permissions used to be like addressing wedding invitations by hand—tedious and time-consuming. We fixed that.

Now you can apply permission groups to entire categories and automatically enforce those permissions on all content within that category. It's permission management that just makes sense 🤌

How It Works

When you're editing a category's permissions (look for that key icon), simply set your desired Permission Group and check the "Enforce permissions on all descendant content" box.

Every single article in that category—plus any subcategories—will automatically inherit those permission settings. You'll know it's working when you see that blue key icon 🔑

Perfect for the Detail-Oriented Teams

Whether you're managing internal docs with different security levels, client-specific content that needs to stay private, or departmental knowledge bases with their own rules, this feature ensures consistent access control without the administrative headache.

No more "oops, forgot to set permissions on that one article" moments! 🤦

Secondary Domains for Multi-Brand Teams

Got multiple brands? Multiple clients? We've got you covered! You can now serve the same knowledge base content under different domains while keeping everything organized in one place. Perfect for:

• Agencies: Manage multiple clients with their own branded knowledge bases
• Multi-brand companies: Same great docs, different brand flavors
• White-label providers: Give your customers their own branded help centers

How It Works

Each secondary domain comes with an add-on cost ($/£/€20 per month), and you can customize the branding differently for each one—logos, colors, styling, the whole nine yards.

You'll need to chat with our team to get everything configured properly, but we promise we're friendly!

Command Palette: Navigate at Light Speed ⚡

Keyboard shortcuts lovers, this one's for you! Hit Cmd/Ctrl + K anywhere in the dashboard to open our shiny new command palette.

Here's what you can do:

• Create content: New articles and categories without the menu marathon
• Navigate instantly: Jump to any article or category with fuzzy search magic
• Access settings: Go straight to specific settings locations
• View metadata: See article info right there inline, including publish status and permission groups

Why We Built This

Honestly? We got tired of watching our own team click through multiple screens just to find one article or tweak a setting. The command palette kills that friction entirely.

Power users are absolutely loving this—once you get hooked on keyboard navigation, clicking through menus feels painfully slow. You've been warned! 😄

Responsive Lighthouse Widget

Here's a small but mighty update: the Lighthouse widget now includes a launcher_button_size option in the Widget API, letting you resize that launch button anywhere between 30 and 150 pixels (default is 70).

// Example implementation
launcher_button_size: 45  // Any value between 30-150

This gives you precise control over how the help widget fits into your site's design.

Widget placement and sizing can make a real difference in usage rates, so now you can optimize for your specific audience. Small change, big impact!

V5 Templates as Starting Points

Custom templates used to mean starting from scratch. Not anymore! You can now use our stock V5 templates as starting points, which is like having a head start in a race.

We've got four flavors to choose from:

• Startup: Clean, minimal design for the "less is more" crowd
• Detailed: Comprehensive layout with extra navigation for the thorough folks
• Bars: Modern card-based design that's easy on the eyes
• ECommerce: Optimized for product documentation

What You Get

Each template comes as a ZIP file with a README.md full of customization instructions. All templates include the latest V5 goodies:

• Dark mode support: Built-in theme switching
• Ask AI integration: Ready for generative search
• Category limiting: Advanced content filtering
• Responsive design: Looks great on any device

Building custom templates from scratch usually takes 10-20 hours. Using our V5 starters? You're looking at 2-4 hours of customization work while getting all the modern functionality baked in. That's what we call a win-win.

Other Smaller (But Still Mighty) Improvements

We've been busy with lots of behind-the-scenes improvements that you probably didn't know you needed (but definitely did):

• Fixed Markdown (.md) file support for imports on PC
• Much improved keyword matching for search. Our search function learned to read between the lines instead of taking everything so literally
• Said goodbye to our old search service. Elasticsearch, you served us well, but it was time to move on. We're not crying, you're crying 🥲
• Auto-upload magic for data:uri images. We now handle all that tedious image uploading automatically on save because frankly, you've got better things to do than babysit image files. You're welcome.
• New default template situation: The V5 Startup template is now what greets new users on signup. We figured, why not give people the good stuff?
• Speed boost for the Stats page thanks to some database wizardry. Magic is real, folks.
• Dashboard performance got a serious upgrade through optimized indexing. It's now so snappy, you might actually miss the old loading time you used to spend contemplating life's mysteries.
• Clip syncing between accounts is now a thing! Just get in touch with us to set it up.
• Table of contents support for dynamic clips in articles. Because even your clips deserve to be organized and easy to navigate. We're all about that structured life.
• Better versioning support for different article types.
• "Open in New Tab" option for images with links. We finally caved to peer pressure and did what everyone else does. Sometimes conformity is actually helpful! Who knew? 🤷‍♀️