How is AI used in Vlge?
Starting at the "top" (so to speak), the Vlge AI "Agent" is informed by your community documents including CC&Rs, ByLaws, and any specific Guidance material you provide (See General Settings - AI Chat Guidance for detailed info). The agent consumes the information and intelligently responds to user requests by understanding both keywords and context.
Example:
A resident is filling out an ACC/ARB form and engages the AI chat function to ask a question. The Agent is aware of the context (ACC/ARB form), the user (resident), and the documentation or guidance provided by you during setup (or updated at any time - more on that below). When the resident asks a question about "Solar" or "Pool Building" or any number of keywords - the Agent will understand and seek the best information to share that matches the context and keywords.
If no guidance is provided, the Agent will respond with some general guidance around where to go to find the information.
In this example, the Sample HOA has provided no guidance on "Solar." The resident asks about solar, and the Agent responds.
Note that because this was asked in the ACC/ARB form page, the Agent begins referencing ACC/ARB/DRB Guidance which would be specific to the process here. Since none has been created, a generic response is given. You can set the response to be more specific with emails or other instructions.
How it works in more detail:
Guidance Items as Context - Your "Guidance Items" are loaded and fed to the AI as context
System Prompt - Tells the AI how to behave, including: "If you don't know the answer based on the provided context, say so and suggest they review the full ACC/ARB Guidelines or contact the [Committee] directly"
Source Matching - After the AI responds, it tries to find relevant guidance items to show as "Related Guidelines"
When no articles appear:
The AI honestly says it can't find info because:
Your guidance items don't include anything about "solar"
The source matching algorithm requires a minimum relevance score (5+) to show sources - Behind the scenes we have set proprietary "relevance scoring" that keeps answers on target - and keeps junk from appearing.
Add a "Solar" Guidance Item
The best solution to this example: Create a guidance item called "Solar Panel Guidelines" in ACC Settings → Guidance Items. Then the AI will have that info to reference.
👉 TIP: Look at your last year's ARB/ACC submissions. What were the most frequent topics? What took the most effort on you, your Board and the volunteer committee to solve? Add that in your ACC/ARB guidance so AI can help.
👉 You can customize AI behavior in two places:
1. AI Chat Guidance Rules
General Settings → AI Guidance
Add keyword-specific rules like: "When questions relate to 'solar': Explain that solar installations require ACC approval and must follow county setback requirements..."
2. AI General Guidance
Admin Tools → AI General Guidance
Add overall instructions that apply to all questions
⚡️ General Settings - AI Guidance
You can read more about guidance here in the page itself as well as update your guidance for your community. Think of this as a way to "answer once" and make your answers available to your members consistently through AI. By providing guidance here, AI can handle the responses for you.
👉 General Guidance (See Specific Guidance below)
This is what is provided to your AI agent by default. You can edit this to cover any specific topics or responses for your community. Vlge provides some basic guidance.
⚠️ Be cautious in editing or removing this guidance to ensure the best experience for your users. AI needs guidance to answer properly and in accordance with your rules.
Specific Guidance - Guidance on particular topics
You can provide your AI Agent guidance on very specific topics that come up frequently in your community, or that you find yourself or the committee answering regularly. This works particularly well for complex topics.
In one community, there is a requirement for an EVFS ("Environmental Vegetative Filter Strip") on every property to help with runoff. Its complex and somewhat different for each property. The Board was able to add all details into the AI guidance and save time by not answering individual questions one by one.
See the setup for a new Guidance Rule below - Solar in this case. Each step has text to help you fill this out. Most communities have this information in emails, notes etc. Copy and paste it here once for long term benefits in member experience and saving volunteer time.
Topic Tags are quick references to common topics and simply help in search and attribution when members are looking for a specific answer.
👉 Board Only Guidance
The Board Help tool available in the Admin Tools section from the lower left nav contains an AI section to help Board Members quickly parse a large amount of data and answer questions. The Board Help AI pulls from the same information available to the general community AI, but in your AI Chat Guidance in General Settings, you can add multiple additional documents to make them accessible to the Board Help tool (See image below). The documents would first be uploaded into a Board access folder in your Community Documents section. Then, in the AI setup tool, you would reference these documents for inclusion in the Board Help tool AI context and click the Re-index button to make sure they're ready as a source.
Note in the above image, some documents have a Status of "Indexed" while others are "Limited" - this is due to the quality of the document being referenced.
👉 Regarding Document Quality - there are two types generally of PDFs:
“Digital PDFs” (Best quality)
These are created directly from a computer (like exporting a Word doc to PDF)
The text is real, selectable, and searchable
It’s like copying and pasting from a document
“Scanned PDFs” (Lower quality)
These are created by scanning paper documents
To a computer, they’re basically just images of text
Sometimes blurry, crooked, or marked up
Some scanned documents can be improved using “text recognition” (OCR), but results vary depending on the quality of the original scan.
With scanned PDFs, your best option, if the document is reasonable in length, is to work with a software tool that has high-quality optical character recognition (OCR). Get the document into a clean format before uploading, which will make it usable in its entirety for AI assistance in Vlge
Common Tools for converting scanned docs to digital PDF
Adobe Acrobat Pro
ABBYY FineReader
Google Drive OCR - Upload a PDF to Google Drive, right click - "Open with Google Docs"
🛟 Need Help with conversion? Email us! Custom document conversion services are available if needed. Pricing depends on volume and quality of documents.