all right everyone welcome to the virtual agent academy let's get started thank you everyone for joining as always please visit our community forum for virtual agent and nlu find the latest content we have ask questions give answers and then if you're watching on youtube and you like what you've seen go ahead and click that like or subscribe button all our academies are recorded and published uh to youtube within the week so you can always go back to review all your pasta cat all our past academies and share them to your colleagues and and friends and co-workers and whatnot a brief note about community forum we have recently updated our quick start guides on our faqs to san diego so take a look at that if you're new uh if you're joining just joining us on the san diego release as always welcome got to give a shout out to knowledge knowledge is coming so please register uh join us in person if you can uh we also have a digital experience if you can join us with all our content all our keynotes available to you right your fingertips i myself will be at the hague may may 11th and 12th in las vegas may 25th and 26th come find me and say hello i'll probably be roaming a booth that has a virtual agent so you know look out for a chat bot and you'll probably find me there as well all right so today's topic uh is is a long time coming and i wanted to do this one for a while it's how to use ui ui ai search excuse me what a morning using ai search and other search tools with the virtual agent uh as some of you may know um virtual agent is a powerful tool that resolves your users questions and and situations and but if they're but if a virtual agent can't serve you uh your particular solution then we have a variety of search tools to provide your users with the answers uh that they want and how to configure that and and what we want to do with those we will jump right into now here's our agenda so some startup tips before we get started um you know you gotta have uh you should maintain a good catalog and knowledge space so you know the better your data the better the results of obviously so uh with a good catalog and knowledge base it's a good um way for the ai search or the contextual search to provide your users with the most relevant results and with up-to-date results so maintaining your your data sets is important please please please install search as a fallback i you know we are we are surprised or you you may be surprised that some sometimes um fallback ends up being just that message you know i'm sorry i can't help you please ask something else but you can in fact replace that with a search far back so rather than just giving you a message you can actually um automatically run your search experience instead as the fallback so please install search as your fallback topic and custom queries and set up and we will go over that momentarily um it's a good opportunity to before when a user types something they usually run into a fallback or run into a search experience if the virtual agent can't find something but you know you could probably try to avoid that in the first place by suggesting effective user utterances so i know sometimes people uh users may type things that are too short type things are too long and as a result our nlu engine or your keyword search might not pick up anything useful so they send to a search fallback but in your greetings you say hey you know for example you can type request a macbook pro your users will know to say to type request a macbook pro instead of just macbook or a long paragraph which basically means they want to request a macbook so you know there are ways to avoid fallbacks altogether by suggesting effective users utterances either in your in your outbound uh outreach to your users as well as in within your ingredients yourself so uh ai search which we'll be discussing is now available has been available since quebec um in in i know in past releases you you've had to request ai search for your instance but no longer if you are on a san diego release ai search is automatically provisioned to you if not then you should just you know log in incident or case and our team will you know servicenow will provide the ai search enable answers for your instance but it is available in the platform for if you're on standard skills and and up for nlu powered search experiences and that may include genius results and some other search experiences that will require a pro or enterprise subscription so just be on the lookout for that all right so uh so today's exercise we will cover uh three topics maybe not in this order but you know we'll cover ai search we'll cover faq because you know we haven't covered that before and then if there's time just we'll cover contextual search which is the oldest but still you know very reliable uh search experience so before that i'm gonna launch a poll and i hope this works hope zoom does this well for me yes please take a look at the poll first question very important have you registered for key 22 yet yet i i hope that's a 100 percent uh yes there uh and then number two perhaps more relevantly and perhaps it'll allow me to tailor or flavor my uh the upcoming uh exercises which search tool are you currently using with virtual agent is it ai search is it contextual search or or neither uh and if it's neither then this academy of course is for you and your team um i'm sorry if uh oh yes the third option for question number one is meant to be no but there are no no's so feel free to register if i haven't mentioned if i haven't mentioned already the digital experience is free of charge uh so there should be no reason uh not to arrest you at least for the digital experience and then you can always go back and and view these videos later so please uh yeah take a look at the poll i'll close it in about 10 seconds so get your answers in there uh response is about 50 right now 51 53 um five more seconds okay thank you interest of time i'm going to close it in a couple seconds here i'll close it right now uh a lot of good uh responses here um i'll share the results actually uh so yeah have you registered k22 a lot of yes is great a lot of i plan to also great and then number two uh a good oh actually i'm i'm surprised that uh ai searches is beating contextual search which is a good thing i like that uh but you're some a lot of folks are using neither and i hope uh we can change that moving forward so uh let's move on so uh i'll cover this and i'll cover this more in detail a bit but this is basically the ai search configuration for virtual agent i'll i'll pause on this slide because i can imagine a lot of people are taking screenshots of their screen right now but don't worry this one this is will be on um on youtube as well but let's first enable ai search in order to do that i'm going to jump into my instance all right and i am going to go to the conversational home page now hopefully y'all can still see my screen as i searched as i shared screen if not let me know uh so um the first thing you want to do is there will be a button here called request ai search if you do not have it already uh if but since i do it's not here anymore because you know that problem is solved but if you haven't requested it yet go ahead and request ai search and then you can just find out whether or not it's enabled for you if you go to ai search status okay and you'll see here ai search is ready congratulations you can review a guided setup and you can also install the ai search management tool so if you haven't already please if you have as3 you haven't installed the ai search tool do that because it gives you things like you know you can you can preview your search you can test searches you can do a bunch of cool things with that so um you know be a lookout for that so the next thing we're going to do is um ensure as i just mentioned to uh install search as a fallback so to do that i'm going to go back to the home page here and i'm going to go to the set up my gradients and if you're in a previous instance such as rome this is basically custom 3ds and setup i'm going to go to the default chat experience and i'm going to make sure under setup topics that my ai search file back contains the ai search fallback topic okay and then my fallback contains the search fallback topic okay this is what i meant earlier if you just have fallback topic here it's going to give you that uh you know that blank or that's that that text message we don't want that uh we want the search file back topic so go ahead and replace that it's not there out of box but you know you have to do that on your own but once you do you get contextual search uh automatically if uh you if an intent is not found or if the topic is not found for what your user typed okay now something else i will mention but we'll not go over too much in depth is search mapping so search mapping determines the search application configuration which is uh a virtual agent default search application you don't need to touch this this is a you know this is as is and then the search ui also known as evam configuration for virtual agent search so this configures uh which server search application to use again don't need to touch this this contain um configures what your search results look like and again you don't you don't need to touch this unless you really want to change the change the appearance of your genius results or change the appearance of your search results um we're not going to cover that but that is that is for your own to discover uh must be a fan of json to touch that okay so that is uh how you set up the ai search and contextual search uh for your virtual agent okay now now let's jump into how to configure a search itself at least in the context of setting it up for virtual agent okay so i'm gonna return to this slide and i'm gonna walk through all of this and as you'll notice um you start with the search application which i just showed you as a va default search application and that's gonna contain things uh such as details such as this your search app contains a search profile and your search profile will contain your search sources and your genius results and your sources contains your index sources and this the search profile is what you publish this index source of which you index and then the change results is what you activate okay we're going to go over that uh right now so i'm going to go back into my instance here and i'm going to start with um the search application right as i type search application this should be under ai search okay now um you know here are my search apps i can theoretically replace va default search in custom groups with any any one of these if i wanted to on my own if i want to create my new one but there's no need so within this va search default application this uses the search the um service portal default search profile okay i'm going to click into that and you know for those of you who are who have configured answers before this is by all familiar to you but here i have my search sources synonyms stop words typo handling genius results and result improvement rules and i've done some boost action here the only thing that we we're going to worry about is search sources and genius results so search sources the first thing i want to click on is service put on knowledge bases so this is obviously my search source being knowledge right and uh some conditions are here i only want knowledges related to x y and z i actually removed a lot of the quite a few of the conditions to uh increase my matched records i wanted more kb articles as opposed to fewer that's why i have 51 here uh because i removed some of these conditions my index source i were to click into this uh is obviously my knowledge base table oops there we go uh you know again retire relaxing conditions here uh and then here are my child tables faq how to you know these are all i believe these are all um child tables of kb knowledge i'm not a knowledge expert but i'm just inferring there but my main source is kb knowledge and you know that's all well and good so if i were to make any changes to uh you know these search sources or these index sources i need to make sure that i uh not only uh excuse me update here but in the in index sources there was index all tables button you need to click that to make sure that ai search captures all that okay so that's where you index your search sources and the next thing i'll show you is genius results so catalog items should be um defaulted to true q a which is also not you know also known as knowledge base this one was not defaulted to true for me so um you may have had to do that in order to do that i just click in a q a it sees it says read only but you can actually change your active status via this ui action here if you click that this will go from inactive to active i've done that here and and that's how you do that okay uh so that's how you configure ai search very very briefly oh the last thing of course is you know if you make any changes to anything in here got to publish those changes click publish click update and and uh that that way your state will change from uh i think pending to published so you know that's that's that great um i suppose i'll pause i'm gonna go i'm about to go back into the designer to uh show you the topic block before i do i'll pause if there are any questions [Music] okay if not i will go back to here so uh let's see so i'll show you what the default uh let's see oh so there is an ai search topic block and i'll show you that but you can't can that's read only so you know don't need to touch it it's there but you can use this topic block to run ai search uh in either an existing topic or if you want in in this very um you know mock example you can uh you know pull dragon ai search uh into a brand new topic uh what i've done here i've actually just taken the ai search fallback topic the one i you know configured in custom greetings setup and i've duplicated it so i can actually you know click around you know because the other one is read only this one duplicated it it's no longer read only this is a i search topic block and um i don't know why i say select but obviously it should be um oops it should be a va search default application but you can change it here if you if you like oops uh yeah there it is teams results search results search metadata all well and good okay so now let's go ahead and test this thing i will not do that i will go to test active topics and hopefully because i shared my desktop you can see my pop-up uh designer tester if not give me a hauler so this is my ingredients i'm going to type something you know let's say someone just types bereavement leaf you know and i don't have a topic for this you can see you can tell that but it will run ai search and here are my um my search results i can tell i ran ai searches because in my variables it's you know topic block ran ai search send some variables over this is the search result uh basically in some format maybe json maybe something else um let's ask something else uh let's just type something with you know something like windows but also i know has no topic this time i get a gene result this is what a genes result looks like and if i had a quick request this item it will take me to portal to request the item uh but genes results in you can tell very rich uh you know image text what have you so that is what a genius result looks like okay so um the next thing i want to show you is uh a new feature in san diego called searching metrics okay so if i go to the conversational dashboard which i also hope you've all installed and are using where is it maybe dashboard is better you can actually uh measure yeah you can actually measure here under use your search metrics uh what folks are clicking not clicking or searching not searching etc you can tell there have been some testing in here both for ai search contextual search and topic links yeah i launched obviously a lot from dynamic reading but if folks uh launched search experiences from other topics they would show up here as as well okay so that's a that's a san diego feature cool uh i'll pause again uh so that's all i had on ai search i'll pause here for any questions before i go into the next topic okay if not i'll go to the next topic which is faq builder so i've left contextual search for last uh but faq builder was a quebec feature um so let's see how to where do i start ah so yeah faq going out of order so the faq builder essentially is basically um if a user types a question that more or less matches an faq that you've already written in your knowledge base it'll just present the answer automatically without you know just just directly so how do you install how do you configure that so the first thing you need to do is to install the knowledge management advanced installer plugin that allows you to create faq article template types and i'll show you what that looks like if i were to go to kb knowledge uh what did i do here maybe if i spelled things better it would yeah so uh you see a bunch of knowledge articles they see i've also created a faq about corporate cell phone plans and it looks something like this basically very easy uh what's my question and the answer right so now if i go back to designer we actually have an faq faq topic block which i can drag into again i can either make my own topic called just with just a topic block uh which i'll show in a moment or i could of course always drag it into an existing topic right so i've created an ftq topic here all is is a query what's your question and the faq topic block which pulls in as a query you guessed it the input variable of what i what the user types into here okay so if i were to test this and i'll type something similar to the question it doesn't have to be exact obviously but i'll just type like what is my corporate cell phone plan so plan i wonder if that doesn't there you go there's the answer no no fuss no huss um straight to it okay and if i wanted to read the full article it'd be a very short article i can click there and it would launch my knowledge base so again that's a quebec feature if you use faqs great tool to have get straight to the point right if you don't use faqs but you you have like a kb articles a 50 faq question in there it may be good just to like you know import them into faq records or to you know take some time to put them in build this very easy topic uh and then uh there you go you've got faq is ready to go at your users fingertips okay awesome any questions on faq before i go to the last topic okay last but not least um contextual search it is the tried and true method if anything you can you should use contextual search that is available to every customer um bar none or you know overall and um in terms of configuration there's not much to do except what i just showed you just pull in the search fallback into your um into your custom greetings and setup as your fallback topic and then of course we have a search context for topic block which which we just found in many many many out of box topics delivered by itsm uh you can also use it yourself in your own topics so um i'll show you let's see did i create a alts yeah i did i created a i duplicated the search fallback topic so that is not read only so i can click into here and show you stuff uh here's a topic block and the one configurable thing i wanted to show you is the context okay so this is a cis id of a search context and uh where do you get this search context i will show you it is from the search context table i'll paste it to chat oops let me send this to everyone and i'll show you what that looks like it is this and these are the search contexts that you can use in your in either contextual search or zing search overall but it is also used in the virtual agent topic block for the search fallback and the one that um virtual aging uses out of box is incident deflection which has both your knowledge your catalog and pin which i imagine are pinned items i'm not exactly a search expert in that in that realm but if i chose to i can replace that cis id this is this was a cis id of what you saw in the topic block if you look at the lower right hand or the lower bar there that's the cis id um i can theoretically replace that ssid with anything in here if i wanted knowledge only if i wanted catalog only if i wanted my own thing like if i were to click an incident deflection i'm not going to edit this but i can edit this with different searchers which is basically the contextual ver contextual searches version of search sources you know i could basically create my own search experience uh if i if i chose to uh but in virtual agents context uh that's where you um configure the search context for your virtual agent search fallback okay and if i can i suppose i can run this as a oh wait that's ai search where's my alt search oh i don't think it'll let me take in an input but i think it needs a an input which would be gotten from the previous topic but anyway um you know you can today easily uh replace your fallback with search fallback give it a test and you'll it'll look up your um catalog and knowledge but i will return to this page and you know remind you please maintain a good knowledge or or catalog or and knowledge base so that your users do get good good search results there cool uh wow i'm on time i have two uh five minutes for q a um again don't forget to visit our community forum uh don't forget to take our our survey after uh this uh session again tell your friends and family about it this and everything i will now pause for uh questions and also i'll also read try to read the chats and the q and a's um jamie asks does that display the entire epic here just another line that just uh that displays the entire faq answer uh so uh hopefully that answers your question uh in terms of relevant lines the genius result for knowledge base shows you relevant portions of the knowledge base i wasn't able to fire off the because it's a machine learning driven i wasn't able to like uh demo or fire off a knowledge-based change result there but that's how you get that there um does ash require any upkeep to retrain periodically uh if you make any configuration changes like i mentioned in the search sources or change results or stop works um you should republish uh if you make changes to the search sourcing you need to re-index so uh and and finally if you make any changes to uh vocabulary sources that which of which the some teams results rely on you'll have to reach re-train or i'm sorry re-sync those vocab sources so there is some maintenance but if you don't if you don't make any changes at all to the configuration you probably don't uh if you're using nlu diane diana asks if you're still using nlu do you still configure a search and or contextual search uh not for contextual search uh but for ai search uh genius results may use nlu and may because i believe there's a class of change results that do not uh then um you do need to you know maintain that vocab source i hope that's what you meant by that question if you're using that search so yes they are separate though like if you configure nlu you still have to configure ace there two separate you know uh products what are some good tips for managing a good kb and catalog good question will um just hygiene uh essentially uh you know other co-panelists feel free to jump in but from my experience you know if you know a kb article on on internet explorer 8 or windows xp may not be the best thing to leave up in there you know a catalog item on you know a travel during the 2020 uh olympics may not be the best thing to have there it's just you know i mean having good you know juicy keywords in your knowledge based on catalog items i'll say you know treat it like you're trying to search up search engine optimize for your items there that'll of course that'll help your you know our search engines regardless pick up on pick up on the items uh anonymous asked if i wanted to include the faq topic as part of my greeting topic would i also need to define the search app for that child topic uh faq topic the faq builder does not use search applications that all you need is a topic block in there uh so that's it's much more straightforward to to use than than ai search so those were two different uh search flows ai search and an faq topic which all you needed was faq builder topic block donna asked any tips on knowledge metadata tags to va tags um good question i've seen that question before community i don't know what knowledge meta tags data tags are i meant to look that up but i'm not a knowledge expert so i'm not sure what that what not what metadata tags are or how they're used um i will say for contextual search or zinc search if they're using non-meta tags now then you know they'll use it again in virtual agent uh joe asks in your future sessions can you show how to use virtual agent in now asian app i can um yeah actually that's actually quite that'll be a fast academy so uh maybe i'll i'll just record that a separate video if you attend i think a mobile app academy they might have shown that once or twice too as well but uh yeah i can i can do that later uh let's see joe asks can we use the same uh last maybe it might be the last question joe can we use the same nlu model to use on search and va to reduce the amount of work to do for translations if we have to use two models um you don't need an nlu again you don't need an nlu model for search you'd only need it for for genius results and ai search okay so that's diff so that's different there's no nlu model uh for for search uh overall uh except again for teens results i hope that clarifies that was a lot of questions but good questions i like them i wish i could do this i wish i i wish i had a pure q a academy uh if if folks let me um okay i think that's all the time we have for today again thank you everyone for your time uh feel free to again to tell your friends daily about uh knowledge about well yes knowledge and va academy we will do this again in two weeks uh two two stays from now have a great rest of your afternoon and morning any follow-up questions again there's community i'll post this recording video uh within the week i have to because i'm going to community next week and i will see you all later thank you bye