What's a question answering bot?

Question answering (Q/A) is a branch of AI within the fields of information retrieval and natural language processing (NLP), which addresses the task of building systems that automatically answer questions posed by humans in a natural language. A Q/A bot, sometimes called by other names (such as virtual assistant or conversational bot), is a computer program that answers questions by querying one or more knowledge bases of structured data and/or finding the answers from a collection of natural language documents (unstructured knowledge and information).

There are two types of question answering systems: open domain and closed domain.

·        Open domain: People can ask any question about any topic. For this type, generating appropriate, human-like responses to an infinite possibility of questions is an enormous challenge.

·        Closed domain: People can only ask questions related to a particular domain. Online technical support or shopping assistants are examples of this type.

Most of today's Q/A systems are the second type, in which the key task is to build and maintain large knowledge bases consisting of pairs of questions and answers specific to the domain. Q/A bots are used by organizations of all sizes around the world, from every industry.

Example: the Q/A bot/virtual assistant used on the HUAWEI CLOUD official website

HUAWEI CLOUD Question Answering Bot

HUAWEI CLOUD Question Answering Bot (QABot) is a cloud service that helps you quickly build, publish, and manage intelligent Q/A bots.

Features

·       Agile Builds

QABot provides tools and online user interfaces to speed up knowledge base building, knowledge mining, and model training.

·       Industry-Vetted Algorithms

The core engine is integrated with industry-vetted AI and NLP algorithms that combine deep learning and traditional algorithms.

·       Comprehensive APIs

APIs are called for question answering, statistics collecting, and knowledge base management. Enterprises or ISVs can use these APIs to easily integrate bot capabilities into their existing systems.

·       Intelligent Q&A Management

-       Automatically analyze and collect statistics on trending questions and topics.

-       Automatically collect unanswered questions, match them to similar Q&A pairs, and continuously expand the knowledge base.

·       Comprehensive Conversation Management

-       Integrate multiple NLP capabilities and an intelligent conversation controller.

-       Flexibly manage the knowledge base with batch operations.

Use Cases

Automatic Q&A

With a powerful knowledge base, the bot can accurately and autonomously answer customer questions.

Technologies such as text mining and association rules are used to extract knowledge about a specific domain from multiple sources, such as logs and operation records, to expand the knowledge base and improve performance.

Agent Assistant

Productivity and customer satisfaction are improved with real-time analyses of interactions between call center agents and customers. During a call, the bot automatically extracts keywords from customer questions and queries for and displays the best answers to support these agents in real time.

With the bot, these agents can answer customer questions faster.

Pre-sales Consultation

Product knowledge bases are built into bots so that product questions from potential customers, including those about product features or comparisons with products from other vendors, can be answered automatically.

The bots are available 24/7 and unsolved questions can be easily and quickly handed over to sales specialists. This enables more customers to be served more quickly.

Getting Started with QABot

On the Conversational Bot Service console on HUAWEI CLOUD, you can buy a Q/A Bot to quickly set up and publish your own bot within hours or even minutes through the following simple steps:

·        Step 1: Buy a Q/A Bot

·        Step 2: Create or import Q/A pairs (knowledge base)

·        Step 3: Start the conversation

·        Step 4: Call the Q/A APIs

·        Step 5: View operational metrics and make improvements as needed

SeeGetting Started with QABotfor more information.

Promotions

In the upcoming Thrive with Cloud festival, HUAWEI CLOUD will be offering QABot for half the price. Be sure to try out the service and see how it can help you boost efficiency and cut costs.