AI Search release notes
Summarize
Summary of AI Search release notes
The ServiceNow® AI Search application delivers a consumer-grade search experience within the ServiceNow AI Platform®. The Australia release, including patches up to Patch 4, introduces enhancements that improve search precision, relevance, and the ability to surface actionable insights from diverse data sources.
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Key Features
- Multi-source synthesis (Australia Patch 4): AI Search can now aggregate and combine information from any indexed data source in your system, providing richer, actionable search results.
- Multimodal captioning for attachments (Australia Patch 3): Automatically generated descriptive captions for visual content in attachments (images, tables, charts) enable keyword-based searches within these elements.
- Hybrid search mode (Australia Patch 1): Combines traditional keyword search with semantic understanding to deliver more accurate, contextually relevant results and reduce zero-result queries. This mode requires Now Assist in AI Search and can be enabled by administrators.
- Integration with Now Assist: AI Search can be configured as the source for Ask Now Assist suggestions, enhancing chat experiences with improved suggestion highlighting, wildcard searching, and lemmatization.
- Improved UI options: Administrators can configure the display of borders between search result cards on portal and global search results pages to customize the visual presentation.
- Enhanced search behavior insights: A refreshed Search Preview UI provides administrators with tools to preview search queries, compare keyword and hybrid modes, and analyze results through summary and detailed views.
- Role-based access for Search Suggestions: Assigning the aisadmin role enables granular administrative access to Search Suggestions tables without granting full admin rights.
- Support for Now Assist Multi-Content Response Genius Results: These results can be prioritized in global and workspace searches, streamlining responses and enabling seamless topic continuation within the Now Assist panel.
Activation and Requirements
- AI Search is enabled by default as a feature of the ServiceNow AI Platform.
- New plugin: Platform Multimodal Service (available from Australia Patch 3) supports multimodal captioning by integrating with the multimodal service backend.
- AI Search does not support Internet Explorer browsers.
- Supports multiple international languages.
Related Applications
- Advanced AI Search Management Tools: Offers dashboards and reports for monitoring AI Search usage and configurations.
- ServiceNow Otto for AI Search: Combines search capabilities with large language model (LLM) processing to provide AI-generated, actionable answers from Knowledge articles.
- External Content Connectors: Enables searching across supported external source systems via the ServiceNow Store application.
The ServiceNow® AI Search application provides a consumer-grade search experience for ServiceNow AI Platform® users. AI Search was enhanced and updated in the Australia release.
AI Search highlights for the Australia release
Display actionable information from any indexed source in your system using multi-source synthesis.
Find Knowledge [kb_knowledge] table attachments containing images, tables, charts, and other visual elements by searching for keywords from automatically generated multimodal descriptive captions.
- Provide actionable search and chat responses in global and workspace search with support for Now Assist Multi-Content Response Genius Results.
- Improve search precision and contextual relevance with hybrid search, available on instances that have Now Assist in AI Search installed.
- Augment the enhanced chat experience by configuring AI Search as the source for Ask Now Assist suggestions.
- Gain insights into search behavior with a refreshed and updated Search Preview UI.
See AI Search for more information.
New in the Australia release
- Australia Patch 4
- AI Search can now use multi-source synthesis to gather and combine information from any indexed source in your system.
- Australia Patch 3
- Multimodal captioning for attachments
- Multimodal captioning automatically generates searchable descriptive captions for images, tables, charts, and other visual elements in indexed attachments. Find attachments by searching for keywords from generated captions.
- Australia Patch 1
- Improve search precision and contextual relevance with hybrid search
- Beginning with Now Assist in AI Search 15.0, administrators on instances with Now Assist in AI Search installed can enable the new hybrid search mode. Hybrid search combines keyword-based search with semantic understanding to deliver more accurate and relevant search results, with fewer zero-result searches.
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Admins can configure the system to use AI Search as the source for Ask Now Assist suggestions in enhanced chat. Making this change activates suggestion term highlighting in Ask Now Assist and provides improvements such as wildcard searching and lemmatization for suggestions.
UI changes
- By default, AI Search displays no borders between search result cards on the portal search results page. Administrators can enable display of borders between search result cards on the portal search results page by configuring the Faceted Search Service Portal widget.
- By default, AI Search displays no borders between search result cards on the global search results page. Administrators can enable display of borders between search result cards on this page by configuring the search result wrapper component for the Unified Navigation app in UI Builder.
Changed in this release
- Australia Patch 1
- If you have Now Assist in AI Search installed, Now Assist Multi-Content Response Genius Results are supported in global and workspace search. Activating Now Assist Multi-Content Response Genius Results in global or workspace search profiles overrides all other Genius Result configurations, so that global and workspace searches only display Genius Result answers from Now Assist Multi-Content Response Genius Results. Virtual Agent topic citations from Now Assist Multi-Content Response Genius Result answers in global or workspace search open the selected topic in the Now Assist panel so the user can continue their conversation on that topic.
- Search Suggestions
- Search administrators with the ais_admin granular admin role can access all Search Suggestions tables. Assign search administrators this role to eliminate needless propagation of full admin access.
- Gain insights into search behavior with a refreshed and updated Search Preview UI.
- Preview search query results using settings from a search application configuration or a search profile. Choose between keyword and hybrid search modes. Display search results as individual EVAM cards or as a JSON-format search query response object, with search and syntax highlighting. Review search query behavior and results and specify search query settings with the new Summary, Genius Results, Details, and Profile admin tools.
Activation information
AI Search is a ServiceNow AI Platform feature that is active by default.
Plugin information
- New plugins
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The following plugins are new in Australia:
Platform Multimodal Service (com.glide.platform_mm_service): Integrates with the multimodal service backend to provide automatic generation of searchable descriptive captions for images, tables, charts, and other visual elements in attachment files indexed for search. This plugin is available beginning with the Australia Patch 3 release.
Browser requirements
AI Search doesn’t support Internet Explorer.
Localization information
AI Search supports international languages. For details of language support by feature, see .