Virtual Agent Knowledge FAQ's

[Laura Dale]

Virtual Agent searches the entire KB database that you point to, it's also supposed to search on Self-Service Articles in particular as well. How do you ServiceNow Admins setup VA to look at Self-Service KB's? How do you identify your Self-Service Articles? so that VA will look at those. 

Currently our Self Service Articles are identified only in the short description of the article: In example: Self-Service: How to resolve unable to change aux ready in Avaya One-X

[Gokul Janardana]

Hi Laura,

Are you talking about the Contextual Search performed by VA? Please explain!

If you are talking about the Contextual Search, in my experience, it searches the end user knowledge articles and the catalogs and returns the relevant results. I tried to find out how exactly it searches and ended up in a restricted api which I did not have access to.

If you need more details, please explain about your set up, so that I can provide more insights on it.

If my answer was useful in any way, please mark it as helpful and accept the solution.

[Laura Dale]

I'm referring to Virtual Agent search on Self-Service Tickets only. These are the types of articles (Self-Service) that I would like to come up first in the contextual results. I'm looking for those tickets to come up in the contextual search results first and then all others that match the meta tags.

[Chris D]

Knowledge access should be managed via user criteria (or roles, but I'd advise against that) applied on the Knowledge Base(s) (recommended) and/or Articles (I'd also advise against this).

In other words, your self-service articles should be in a KB that is open to all - or at least more widely open to all relevant users - using user criteria for Can Read. Note, if Can Read is empty (no user criteria), that means it's open to all. And any non-self-service articles (agent-specific/level 2, etc.) should be in KBs open only to the relevant users - i.e. using User Criteria that applies to specific support groups.

When you do that, anything in ServiceNow that searches Knowledge - Contextual Search, AI Search, related records, etc. - will use the user's permissions and only show articles they have access to.

If you need to filter further - i.e. if users intentionally have access to a lot more knowledge but you just want to show them specific types of articles in Virtual Agent, you will need to explore creating a new Search Context or AI Search Profile for use in VA. You specify the Search Context in the Contextual Search topic block input and you specify the AI Search Profile in the Conversational Interfaces Settings, specifically VA > Custom Greetings and Setup. 

[Laura Dale]

The Self-Service articles are public to all users, Self-Service articles reside in the same  database that is also public. Just trying to find out if VA will search on those Self-Service articles first.