Grounded answers
This page covers one capability: answers people can check. The rule it runs under is that if an answer matters, the system should be able to show what supported it, and it should fail honestly when that support is missing.
Answering is one of three things a Radioso agent does — it also acts and hands off, inside the rules you author. Guided autonomy covers the wider picture.
The product point of view
Most AI products optimize for fluency: they would rather sound confident than say “I don’t know.” Radioso optimizes for defensibility instead, and that trade-off shows up everywhere in the product, not just in the chat window. Retrieval behavior is tunable per agent, because how you got the evidence matters as much as what it says. Citations sit in the answer itself, not behind a debugging toggle — a visitor sees them the same moment they see the reply. An unsupported claim degrades honestly instead of bluffing through it. And when an answer looks wrong, an operator can trace exactly why the system said what it said, instead of guessing.
A simple example
Imagine a customer asks:
Do you offer refunds after 30 days?
A generic assistant answers from the patterns it has seen elsewhere — plausible, polished, and not necessarily true for your business. A grounded agent instead searches your workspace documents, answers from what it finds there, cites the source, or says plainly that it doesn’t have support for that claim. Radioso is built for the second behavior, on every surface it talks through.
How Radioso gets there
Retrieve evidence
The system searches workspace documents and applies system defaults plus any agent-specific retrieval settings to gather the best candidate context.
Build the answer with traceable support
The answer path keeps track of which chunks support which parts of the response, so the connection between claim and evidence survives all the way to the reply.
Present answers with citations
The presented answer keeps that citation metadata attached, so what the visitor sees links straight back to the chunks that support it.
Why this matters in practice
A support team needs answers it can stand behind, not ones it has to hedge after the fact. A customer-facing agent needs to avoid inventing policy it was never told. A customer asking about pricing or a return window needs a path back to the actual source of that claim, not just Radioso’s word for it. And an operator improving quality needs to inspect retrieval behavior directly — which chunks were considered, which ranked highest — rather than poke at the system prompt and hope.
Retrieval, citations, and unsupported-answer handling are one contract: change how any one of them behaves and the other two still have to hold.
What success looks like
A visitor asks about your return window and gets the number that is actually written in your policy document, with a citation they can follow to the paragraph it came from. Ask something your corpus never covered and the agent says it doesn’t know, rather than filling the silence. When an answer does come out wrong, the trace names the stage that failed — ingestion, retrieval, or composition — so the operator knows which setting to reach for.