How to build a chatbot… that can answer questions concisely
Who can say they enjoy finding answers to questions by using search on a website? Even when the results are relevant, we still have to navigate and read blocks of text to find answers — which might be only one or two words among sentences and paragraphs.
A well-designed chatbot can provide a more friendly experience. Instead of searching, you ask the chatbot a question and it returns a succinct answer. But building one that functions like this has been challenging.
Until now.
We just released a new version of the Watson Assistant Search Skill with short-answer retrieval. This feature lets the virtual agent return the precise answer — in a few words — from longer sentences or passages, and emphasize it in context. It makes answers in chat windows or text messages much easier to digest.
On top of that, Watson Assistant improved its ability to extract answer from FAQs. With this new version, the Search skill can not only return answers from web pages with FAQs, but also various document types — giving administrators access to broader sources of information for returning precise answers.
Finally, we have incorporated answer retrieval in Watson Assistant’s unique Suggestions features, which detects when users are stuck and provides them alternate paths to get what they need:
All of these features ensure that Watson Assistant can find answers even if administrators had not trained their assistant with a specific intent or action. Instead it can turn a corpus of support and troubleshooting documents to find the answers — increasing the number of cases it can handle on its own before handing a customer off to a human agent, if needed.
These revolutionary capabilities are fully integrated with IBM Watson Assistant’s Search skill to allow clients to:
- Build faster by creating Q&A experiences in minutes
- Reduce maintenance by syncing with websites and data sources, to provide up-to-the-minute current information
- Decrease deflection of customers to human agents by handling unexpected questions with inclusive, contextual responses.
From IBM Research to Watson products
Behind the scenes Watson Assistant integrates with the new version of Watson Discovery, IBM’s AI-powered intelligent search and text-analytics platform. Through Discovery, Watson Assistant can provide short answers from longer text.
Let’s say the customer asks Watson Assistant, “What are your office hours?” Instead of returning, “Our branches are open weekdays 8am-5pm,” Watson Assistant can now return “8am-5pm.” By detecting the central relevant fact from that sentence, Watson Assistant returns a precise, concise answer. This short-answer retrieval capability comes from IBM Research and was announced in late 2020. See the screenshot below for how Watson Assistant answers questions about bitcoin based on content from the bitcoin.org site.
IBM also improved the FAQ extraction feature to return answers from any document — in addition to any website containing question and answer pairs. Previously, clients could point Watson to an existing FAQ page’s URL, and Watson Assistant would sync automatically with that page to provide the latest answers as content changes. With the new version of the Search skill, clients also can incorporate additional document types, such as Word or PDF — common document types for providing support or troubleshooting. Also new, clients can use more than one Collection in Watson Discovery, for greater flexibility and access to broader sources of documents.
Finally, search results from the Search Skill can now appear in Watson Assistant’s revolutionary Suggestions Menu. The Suggestions feature detects when users are getting frustrated. For example, if a user repeats a question twice, it’s a good indication that they’re not getting the answer they need. So Watson Assistant shows similar and related answers — Suggestions — to set the conversation on the right path again. Now, Suggestions can bring options from the Search skill, increasing the chances of providing the right answer.
Using Watson Assistant’s Search skill, a major telecom company in the United Kingdom managed to put an assistant in production on their assistance website in only two weeks. Compared to their previous chatbot implementation with other providers, they were able to reduce the time to production by 80 percent. In addition, the system was able to answer customer questions on its own 60 percent of the time on its own without help from human agents. That rate improved to more than 90 percent after adding additional content (and leveraging other Watson Assistant capabilities). Their support center agents can now focus on more high-value tasks.
Try it out in minutes
Clients can get started in minutes. To do so, follow these three steps:
- Create a Watson Assistant instance and add a Search Skill to your assistant.
- Create a “web crawl” collection, add the URL of your website’s FAQ page (or try with https://bitcoin.org/en/faq ) and apply FAQ extraction.
- Test it and see how Watson is able to return clean and concise answers to your questions.
Try Watson Assistant now and get access to all these exciting features for free!
