Ask 'how do I…' and get the right lesson

A search box that understands plain questions, tolerates typos, and never dead-ends on no results.

What it is

Typing a question into the Academy panel scores it against every registered tutorial. It strips intent prefixes ('how do I', 'where do I find'), drops stopwords, and matches on authored intents, title tokens, keywords and category names, with a one-edit fuzzy tolerance so 'estimtes' still finds Estimates. Below the score floor the panel says 'No match — browse categories' rather than showing nothing.

Also called: search help · natural language help · find a tutorial · help search

See it
Ask 'how do I…' and get the right lesson
New lead 2
Marlin Hoover
$20k
Delia Yoder
$35k
Contacted 4
Sutter Kline
$55k
Ronan Petsch
$64k
Ivy Brubaker
$51k
Estimate 4
Ivy Brubaker
$61k
Gideon Alt
$50k
Sold 3
Marlin Hoover
$75k
Delia Yoder
$19k
The panel's search field with a typed question and ranked results below — AcademyPanel.tsx. Sample data — no customer information appears here.
How it works
  1. 1Normalise the query: lowercase, strip punctuation, strip intent prefixes, drop stopwords
  2. 2Score each tutorial: exact intent phrase (highest) → title tokens → keywords → category name
  3. 3Apply Damerau-Levenshtein ≤ 1 fuzzy matching to query tokens of five characters or more
  4. 4Show the top six above the floor; otherwise fall back to category browsing
  5. 5Log zero-result queries (debounced, on the final query — never per keystroke) to a capped buffer so gaps in the library get found
Why we built it

Builders do not search for feature names. They type what they are trying to do, from a phone, with cold hands and a typo in it — 'how do i send an estimtes' — and a search that needs the exact word returns nothing and gets abandoned for a phone call to the office. This one strips the question words, tolerates a misspelling, and when it genuinely has no answer it hands back the category list instead of an empty screen. Every question that finds nothing is kept, and that list decides which lesson gets written next.

The problem
  • Help search that only matches exact feature names is useless to a non-technical user
  • Nobody finds out which questions the help never answered
Sound familiar?
What you get
Plain questions find the lesson
Typos still match
Unanswered questions are captured so the library gets better

See it on your own jobs

Twenty minutes, your numbers, no slide deck. We’ll build one of your real buildings in front of you and send you the estimate link at the end — yours to keep either way.

or keep browsing features →