Introduction
AI Search is our cognitive search engine that provides AI-driven, consumer-grade search experience for Portal, Now Mobile, and Virtual Agent. AI Search enables organizations to deliver natural search experiences and provide better self-service across different languages — all without needing data science expertise. It offers following capabilities:
- Natural language processing
- Machine learning
- Query intent
- Actionable, genius results
Refer to product documentation on AI search for additional details.
Academy Session
- Understanding the ServiceNow’s Search capabilities
- Live demo of Employee Center Search experience (Demo starts 38:56 onwards)
For other feature deep-dives, refer to other topics covered as part of Employee Center Academy series.
FAQ's
1. What configuration options are available for tweaking the search experience on Employee Center?
There are multiple options available both from Zing and AI Search. See below for the options on AI Search.
To learn more, watch the Employee Center Academy on Search Configurations.
2. Can we use Zing search on Employee Center?
Yes, Employee Center will automatically default to Zing search when AI search is not turned on.
3. What is Enterprise and External Search?
Enterprise Search and External Search are conceptual terms used to describe the ability to search for content residing outside of ServiceNow (for example policy documents in SharePoint) and making it available as part of the search results on ServiceNow.
4. Is AI Search available out of the box?
Yes. See the full quick start guide for more information about plugins, entitlements and activation.
5. What is needed to start with AI search? What kind of effort are we looking at?
AI Search comes with some OOB configurations, covering a majority of use cases for Knowledge and Catalog. For the full quick start guide, head this way.
6. Is search sources where you can indicate specific knowledge bases or catalogs to return in a portal?
Yes, the AI Search > Search Sources do exactly that. The AI Search needs to be enabled on that portal (i.e. the checkbox 'Enable AI Search' is true).
7. Can I use a dot walking condition to filter my content on a search source (for example filtering KB based on Author.Active is true)?
Yes, you'll have to enable indexing of referenced table fields for the indexed source first, using the dot_walk_fields attribute.
8. Can I use AI Search to search for Incidents and Requests?
Yes, the Task [task] table and tables that extend it can be used as Indexed Sources, they just need to have a retention policy.
9. Does AI Search in mobile work in parallel to AI Search for the portal? For example, if an external search source is created once, it can then be related to both portal and mobile?
Yes this is how this works. You can use different Search Application records linked to different sources to drive the behavior of your mobile apps and portal(s).
10. Can you recommend any documentation on how to best actively manage AI Search after go live? I am referring to features like auto complete, type corrections, stop words, Promoted results, etc.
See this article.
11. Is AI Search also available through Virtual Agent?
Yes, see this article for more details.
12. Are there any tips for setting up a search for content that may exist in a PDF document that is attached to a knowledge article?
You can enable the indexing of attachments for a table with indexed source attributes (docs). When enabled, AI Search evaluates the relevancy including the attachments. As a best practice, only use attachments under 5MB and limited to 10,000 words.
13. Does AI Search read Meta fields in catalog items?
Yes. See this article for more details.
14. Search reporting options with AI search: Are the sys_search_event tables still used or are there new ones for reporting?
Yes, queries are still logged in that table. We recommend enabling User Experience Analytics to access OOB reporting. More details can also be found in the docs regarding Search signal tables.
15. If we have multiple languages in the instance, does the search pull up only what my language is set for articles, or all show articles that have different languages?
AI Search provides better relevancy in 6 languages by leveraging language-specific processing that Zing lacks. Because of this, by default, we only search in the user's session language. However, there is a mechanism to designate content as "global" to make it searchable by all available starting in San Diego, and a workaround to enable the same in behavior in Quebec/Rome. See this article for more.
16. Is there a module available to debug and better understand why a user might be getting a certain result with AI Search?
Yes, AI Search also released a store app “AI Search Advanced Management Tools”, after installing this store app, a preview UI will be available for customers to debug any specific search query and get explanations on search behavior.
17. Some users are experiencing slowness to get search results or it takes long to get results. What do I do?
Performance issues of search are often caused by long-running user criteria. To find criteria causing issues, navigate to System Diagnostics > Stats > Slow Scripts, filter the Label with starts with user_criteria, sort by date.
18. Does the Q&A snippet only show the first 3 to 4 lines of the article?
Q&A will find the snippet within a longer Knowledge article that answers the user’s question. This is what gets displayed in the card so that the user doesn’t need to click through to the article and read the entire article.
19. Is there a capability to search the KB and bring back the relevant content and not the entire article?
Yes, this is the Q&A Genius Result.
20. Can you explain how genius results differ from pinning content (using keywords)?
We have three Genius Results types out of the box, supported by our machine learning capabilities: Catalog Item, People Search, and Q&A for finding answers to questions within longer Knowledge articles.
"Pinning" a result (technically we refer to this as "promoting" a result via Result Improvement Rule), lets you choose a specific result to appear first in the standard (non-Genius) search results when certain configurable trigger conditions are met.
21. In order to use the Q&A Genius Results, do we need to "train" the AI search?
Q&A Genius Results work out of the box without any configuration or training.
22. In what widgets can AI search be used?
AI Search is used in the following widgets: Homepage Search widget, Typeahead Search widget, Faceted Search widget, Catalog Homepage Search widget, Knowledge Breadcrumbs widget. If these widgets were customized, they can be reclassified following this procedure.
23. Can I change the look and feel of the search results in my portal?
You can customize the look and feel of the AI Search experience in Service Portal by updating the relevant C... or create a CSS include to override the theming for AI Search in Service Portal.
24. Can I change the navigation URL when I click on a result?
See how to achieve this using the EVAM configuration in this detailed article.
