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Only draft when sources are found
By default Overdesk drafts a reply for every conversation, even when the knowledge base has nothing on the topic. This setting tells it to hold back instead: when the search finds nothing to write from, the conversation is left for your team without a draft. It is off by default.
Why you might turn it on
A draft written with no matching article or past reply leans on the model's general knowledge, and it reads exactly as confident as a grounded answer. If your team would rather start from a blank reply than fact-check one, turn this on.
Turn it on
- Open Customize AI.
- In the Draft replies card, tick Only draft when Overdesk finds relevant sources.
- Select Save at the bottom of the card.
It takes effect on the next conversation. Only admins can change it.
What counts as a source
Before writing, Overdesk searches your knowledge base for help articles, past conversations and saved replies. Any one of those is enough to draft. The customer's other tickets and their account details from a store or billing tool don't count, because neither tells Overdesk how to answer the question.
The check runs before the model is called, so a conversation that is held back costs nothing on your Anthropic API key.
How strict it is
The setting holds a draft back only when the search comes back empty. If Overdesk finds anything to work from, even a loosely related article or past conversation, it drafts. In practice, that happens while your knowledge base is empty or its first indexing is still under way.
If the search itself fails, Overdesk drafts anyway. A search outage is never read as "nothing found", so it can't switch drafting off or tell you that your knowledge base had nothing.
Where it shows up
A conversation held back is never silent. When drafting skips conversations for this reason, the run on the Runs page says so in Details, for example: "Overdesk found no relevant sources for one conversation, so it wrote no draft." If that was the only reason the run drafted nothing, its status is Skipped.
If someone selects Re-draft on a conversation with nothing to draw on, Overdesk replies that it found no relevant sources and that this workspace only drafts when it finds some.
Follow-up nudges don't search the knowledge base, so this setting doesn't affect them. See Follow-up nudges.