Accessing knowledge article using NLU via virtual agent

[aok]

Hi All,

The requirement is to set up accessing knowledge base articles using natural language via Virtual agent.

Can I achieve this through configuration(OOB) or do I need to create a NLU Model.
I went through the basics of NLU, but time is limited.  Please guide me.

[Brian Bakker]

Hello aok,

You should use the Fallback Topic or AI Search Fallback Topic to search the Knowledge Base for articles based on the utterance using in Virtual Agent, where NLU is unable to predict an intent. Please review Setting up chat experiences for Virtual Agent users and Working with setup topics. You will have to customise the OOB Fallback Topic to search the required Knowledge Bases based on the utterance provided.

I hope that helps.

Regards,

Brian

 

[aok]

Hi Brian,

Thanks for the reply, I'll go through the topics which you have suggested.

Regards,

AOK

[SaurabhGidwani]

@Brian Bakker  I have a requirement from customer where they don't want NLU to auto select the topic based on NLU prediction rather they want based on NLU it show them multiple topics + kb to select from, Is it possible? Because to the best of my knowledge NLU auto triggers the topic if its the only match

[Chris D]

Not possible ootb. You could probably hack something together by triggering NLU by code (sorry not sure how) but then you'd also have to combine it with a hacked together KB search/query - and then you'd need to do something custom with the user's selection... yeah I wouldn't bother.

If you have lots of very good KB articles, your best bet may just be to have a very high confidence level (90%?) in your NLU model to push a lot of users to the AI Search Fallback which does the KB search. Either that or just build in the AI Search topic block to all/more of your topics - let's say you have a "Slack Troubleshooting" topic, you can start that topic with an AI Search of the utterance which will then immediately return the user KB result(s) if any and if not helpful, just continue to the normal topic logic. 

Or - idk why I didn't think of this first - you could just build AI Search into your Greetings topic (then you wouldn't need to put it into each topic). If you're not committed to keeping the "Show me everything" menu, I don't think there's any reason this wouldn't work... just take the user's utterance in via a normal text input, do an AI Search with it to return them KB results (if any), then if not helpful, just set the utterance as a 

vaVars.global_search_text and trigger NLU via vaSystem.topicDiscovery().

It's not going to show Topics and KB articles at the same time, but I think this could be one of the better options to keep your customizations down to a minimum - and in fact, this would be rather simple to do as I'm imagining in my head...