Forms whose responses become knowledge

Survey tools give you a spreadsheet. Two hundred rows of free text later, someone has to read all of it and write a summary, and by the time they finish another thirty responses have arrived.

Docutrain forms take a different route. A form is a standalone, shareable page built in the dashboard, and its responses accumulate into a dedicated chat document you can query directly — "What are the most common complaints this month?" The Forms tab puts it in a line: build forms whose responses become a chattable knowledge base. Unlike helpers, a form is not attached to an existing document's chat.

Forms belong to a workspace, so the list follows whichever one is chosen in the Workspace strip. Above it, Forms Library shows the count, a search box matches on title, slug, or description, and a Status dropdown filters the list.

Building a form

Select Create Form. The builder puts editing controls on the left and an interactive Live preview on the right, reporting "n of m fields visible" as your conditions take effect.

The Details card holds title, description, and Slug, the short name used in the public link. The slug fills in from the title and can be adjusted before the first save; after that it is fixed so shared links keep working. Below it, the Fields card carries an Add field menu grouped as Text, Choice, Opinion, and Layout.

Every input field has a Label, optional Help text, and a Required toggle under Basics. Fields appear as numbered rows; selecting one expands its editor in place, grouped into Basics, Options, Scale, and Logic. Arrows reorder, the trash control deletes, and deleting a field also clears any conditions pointing at it. Section rows are drawn differently — a bookmark icon, a shaded row, a Section marker — so structure stands out in a long form.

Conditional display

In a field's Logic group, tick Show this field only when… and pick a controlling field, an operator (is, is not, or is one of), and the values to match from that field's own options. The controlling field must be a choice field appearing earlier in the form. Questions hidden by a condition are skipped entirely and recorded as not shown, and a step whose questions are all hidden is skipped too.

Settings

The Settings button opens Form settings. Success screen message is what appears after submission, defaulting to "Thank you for your response!". Collect respondent name/email adds a required Your name and Your email step at the start.

The setting worth thinking about is Include respondent identity in chat knowledge. With it off — the recommended default for sensitive topics — the companion chat document refers to people as "Respondent #1", "Respondent #2", and names and emails stay in the responses table only. Changing it re-processes all responses. Let respondents resume later saves in-progress answers in the respondent's own browser; leave it off for sensitive forms filled in on shared devices.

Publishing, opening, and closing

A form is Draft, Open, or Closed. Save stores your work, and a new form stays a draft until you publish. Publish makes it live at its public link and creates the companion chat document. A form needs at least one real question first — sections alone are not enough. Because publishing creates a document, it counts against your plan's document allowance, and at the limit you get "Document limit reached (n/m)." See plans and limits.

Close stops accepting responses, showing visitors "This form isn't accepting responses right now."; Reopen resumes. You can keep editing a published form; if it has responses already, a notice reminds you that they keep their original wording while edits apply to new ones. Each row offers Copy public link, Edit, Responses, the publish or close action, and delete. Published forms carry a Paired chip.

Respondents and responses

What respondents see

The public form page carries your owner branding — logo and accent color. Longer forms split into steps, one per section plus a Your details step at the front when identity is collected, with a progress sidebar on larger screens. Continue validates the current step, highlighting unanswered required questions and invalid email addresses. On the last step the button reads Submit, with a small note that "Answers stay private". If resuming is on and someone returns with saved progress, a banner says "We saved your progress from earlier." with a Start over option. Submissions are rate limited, and there is no captcha to solve.

Reviewing responses

The Responses view lists submissions under #, Submitted, Identity (only when collected), Status, Preview, and Actions. The status chip reads Synced once a response is in the companion document, Pending while incorporation is in progress, or Failed — a retry control reprocesses it and hovering shows the reason. You can open a response in full, delete individual ones, or use Export CSV, where multi-select answers are joined with semicolons and questions a respondent never saw are left blank.

The companion chat document

You never upload this one. It appears the moment you publish, takes the form's title, and opens with "Ask questions about the responses to your form title." It is created owner-restricted and unlisted in public galleries, so only people with access to your organization can chat with it until you change that in the editor.

It stays current on its own: each submission is added shortly after it arrives, and an overall summary is rebuilt a few minutes after the last submission in a burst. In the documents library it carries a small Form badge. Retraining is blocked, because there is no source file to replace and regenerated content would overwrite anything you supplied — the Retrain tab is hidden. See retraining and history.

The form and its document are a pair, and deleting either deletes both along with every response. From either the Forms tab or the Documents library the row menu reads Delete form & chat document, the confirmation lists what goes — chat document, form configuration, every submission — and you type DELETE to confirm.

The contact form on a document

Separately from all of this, any document can offer a Contact tool that emails a reader's message straight to you. In the document editor's Contact form section, turn it on and set Recipient email. Addresses are entered as pills: the first is labeled To and receives messages, every later one is CC. Intro text replaces the default line above the form.

Verification matters here. An address only receives contact-form mail after confirming it is willing to, and each pill shows its state: a check mark when verified, "Your email" for your own sign-in address, Send link for one never asked, and "Link sent", which becomes Resend after a cooldown. Two warnings — Recipient email required and Recipient not verified — flag the cases where readers would get a dead form, and in both of them the Contact tool is simply hidden. Unverified CC addresses block nothing; they are quietly left off until they verify.

Readers find Contact among the chat tools, described as Send a message. It asks for Your email and a Message of up to 5,000 characters, and confirms "Message sent". Messages go to the verified recipients with the reader's address as the reply-to, and the document's title appears in the subject line.

One more tool sits nearby in the dashboard's content group, though most customers will not see it: the Diagram Interpreter is listed for super admins only. It handles diagram-heavy files whose arrows and branch structure do not survive plain text extraction, drafting a written interpretation that a human reviews before it is sent to training.