Difference between RAG and knowledge source

General
1

Hi there!

I’ve been conducting some experiments on information retrieval from documents (mostly pdfs) and I’ve noticed a pattern between pdf rag search tool and knowledge source.
It seems like the pdf RAG search returns information without much depth, like a text summarization that misses a lot of important details (i.e. statistics) that have been asked in prompts for the agents with this tool. While knowledge source has shown a more detailed summary answering key points, drastically different from the other tool; which left me wondering why is that behavior happening as it seems that both use embedders, vector databases, queries…

My final question is: how exactly are the “external information sources” being used to provide information for the crew that works differently than RAG tools?

thx!

5 Likes
2

Bump.

Don’t have an answers, but I am also interested in this. Not exactly sure what the difference is between PDF passed in as knowledge (from crewai.knowledge.source.pdf_knowledge_source import PDFKnowledgeSource) versus using the PDF search tool (from crewai_tools import PDFSearchTool).

3

bump also super interested and have failed ot get any rag functions to work with the crews

4

I totally agree. PDF passed as knowledge works much better than with PDG RAG tool.

1 Like
5

I have been using knowledge sources “as if” they are RAG. I find this works best with me default memory for Memory - CrewAI where it stores and updates you long term memory is also useful.

1 Like
6

I would also love to know move about when to use knowledge and when to use tools.

7

What about using NotebookLM as your RAG? Is there a tool to do that?