Not everything worth answering questions from is stored in Notion or Drive. A pricing sheet, an onboarding PDF, a one-off Word doc someone wrote three years ago — these are often exactly the documents customers ask about.
Supported file types
Lumen Chat accepts PDF, DOCX, Markdown, and plain text files directly, plus pasted text for anything that doesn't exist as a file at all. Upload from the Documents section of your dashboard — there's no separate "source" to connect first.
How it's processed
Each file is parsed and chunked the same way content from Notion, Drive, or a website crawl is, so the chatbot treats it identically regardless of where it came from. If a document fails to process — a scanned PDF with no extractable text, for example — you'll see the failure reason on the document and can retry after fixing it.
Updating an uploaded file
Files don't auto-sync the way a connected Notion database or Drive folder does, since there's no external source to check for changes. When a document changes, re-upload it or edit its content directly, and the chatbot picks up the new version the next time it's indexed.
When to use uploads over a connector
Uploads are the right call for one-off or infrequently-updated documents. If a piece of content changes often, you're usually better off keeping it in Notion, Drive, or on your website and connecting that as a live source instead — see our guides on Notion, Google Drive, and website crawling.
Upload your first document and it's searchable within minutes.