getting-started/Core Concepts of Pop

1.2 Core Concepts of Pop

To help you fully understand Pop’s overall capabilities, this chapter introduces several core concepts.
Once you understand them, you will be able to more efficiently use Pop to manage knowledge, process documents, build automation workflows, work with AI, publish applications, and manage your website visitors and customer service.


🌐 1. Document Center

The Document Center is the foundational module of Pop, responsible for managing all your local documents.
All documents are stored locally and are never uploaded to the cloud automatically.

Supported formats include:

  • PDF
  • Word / Excel / PowerPoint
  • Markdown
  • TXT
  • Images (JPG / PNG / WebP, etc.)

Key capabilities:

  • Reading & previewing
  • Highlighting & note-taking
  • Automatic table of contents parsing
  • In-document search
  • AI-powered document Q&A
  • Batch import

💡 The Document Center can be seen as the entry point to all knowledge, and one of the input sources for the Knowledge Base and Workflows.


🧠 2. Pop Copilot (AI Engine)

Pop Copilot is Pop’s AI engine and powers intelligence across all modules.
It is not just a chat assistant, but a system that can:

  • Read and understand documents
  • Execute nodes inside workflows
  • Process structured and unstructured data
  • Interact with the Knowledge Base
  • Generate charts, text, code, and reports
  • Act as the AI co-pilot of your entire system

Pop supports multiple AI models simultaneously, such as:

  • OpenAI
  • DeepSeek
  • Moonshot
  • OneAPI / self-hosted model services
  • Third-party OpenAI-compatible APIs

You can assign different models to different modules—for example:
Model A for the Knowledge Base, and Model B for Workflows.


📚 3. Knowledge Base

The Knowledge Base enables AI to perform precise Q&A based on your materials.
Unlike ordinary document reading, the Knowledge Base performs structured processing:

  • Automatic chunking
  • Text cleaning
  • Index building
  • BM25 / Vector / Hybrid search
  • Retrieval (best text segments)
  • Reranking

Suitable for:

  • FAQ development
  • Product documentation
  • Internal team manuals
  • Technical archives
  • Study notes systems
  • Website customer service backends

📌 Compared with Document Center:
Document Center is for human reading,
Knowledge Base is for AI retrieval and automated answering.


🔧 4. Workflow

Workflows are one of Pop’s strongest modules, enabling you to build complex automation tasks without writing code.

A workflow includes:

  • Nodes — individual execution steps
  • Connections — data flow between nodes
  • Variable system — store and pass intermediate results
  • Run logs — debugging and monitoring
  • Publish as App — turn workflows into reusable interactive applications

Common node examples:

  • AI conversation / content generation
  • Text processing (formatting, extraction, replacement)
  • PDF generation & merging
  • Excel import / export
  • Image transcoding & compression
  • HTTP requests to external APIs
  • JSON parsing & field extraction
  • Chart generation
  • File reading & writing

Suitable for building:

  • AI-generated reports, documents, weekly summaries
  • Data batch processing and format conversion
  • Static site auto-generation
  • AI content moderation
  • File conversion & batch analysis
  • Internal workflow automation (approval, syncing, etc.)

📦 5. Apps

Pop allows you to package workflows into interactive apps.
Each App can:

  • Design its own UI layout (forms, result sections, chart areas, etc.)
  • Define multiple input fields
  • Output text, charts, and files
  • Run as an independent application instead of a workflow editor
  • Have its own run logs and debugging tools

An App is essentially:

“The final product form of your AI tools, workflows, and automated scripts.”

Suitable for building:

  • Content or article generators
  • AI résumé analyzers
  • Financial report generators
  • Website asset processing tools
  • Sales proposal generators
  • Data visualization tools

📊 6. Site Analytics & Chatbot

Pop’s JS SDK can be embedded into any website to provide:

① Website Visitor Analytics

  • Real-time visitor tracking
  • Visitor location analytics
  • Device & browser information
  • Page dwell time & bounce rate
  • Page navigation paths

② AI Website Chatbot

  • FAQ Q&A based on your Knowledge Base
  • Multi-language support
  • Custom themes & greeting messages
  • Works jointly with Pop Copilot
  • Embeddable page-side chat widget

Ideal for website owners, small teams, and independent developers.


📊 Core Concept Comparison Table

Concept Main Function Typical Usage
Document Center Manage & read files Import PDFs/Word, view, highlight, annotate
Pop Copilot Provide AI intelligence Chat, summarize, generate text, embed in flows
Knowledge Base Structured retrieval & Q&A Build FAQ, product docs, internal knowledge base
Workflow No-code automation pipelines Multi-step AI/data processing tasks
App Productize workflows Form UI, one-click generation of outputs
Analytics/Chatbot Website analytics & AI chat Embed on website for insights & support

🔚 Summary

The core concepts of Pop can be summarized as:

  1. Document Center — Source of information and inputs
  2. Pop Copilot — The intelligent processing engine
  3. Knowledge Base — Enterprise-grade Q&A system
  4. Workflow — Automation execution engine
  5. Apps — Productization and interface layer
  6. Website Analytics & Chatbot — Website extension capabilities

Together, these components form Pop’s complete ecosystem, enabling it to cover everything from personal knowledge management to AI application development.