Build Your First FAQ Chatbot

For this tutorial, use the CSV file we will provide you. But you can create your own using the following guidelines:

• The CSV file is in UTF-8 format and contains 2 columns, with headers Question and Answer.

• Make questions actual questions, not just phrases or keywords. You can create alternative questions – for the same answers – by writing a question-answer pair and then on the next row writing another question without an answer (this is an alternative question for the answer in the previous line).

• Limit answers to 640 characters. For long answers, provide a short answer and send users to an external site. Answers should rephrase question

Here’s an example:

More guidelines are in the Help Documentation.

You can create your own in Microsoft Excel, and save it as a CSV UTF-8 (Comma-delimited) (.csv) file.

Download our sample HowToBuildAChatbot.csv, which has questions and answers related to learning how to create chatbots with SAP Conversational AI.

1. Go to https://cai.tools.sap/, and sign in.

   If you don’t have an account, create one.

2. Click + New Bot.

3. Select the following:

   

   Field Name	Value
   1. What do you want your chatbot to do?	Retrieve Answers
   2. Create your bot	Name: FAQBot Description: A bot to help users find answers Language: English
   4. Data Policy	Non-personal and Non-vulnerable
   5. Bot Visibility	Public

4. Click Create.

1. On the Train tab, click Upload Document, and select the file you downloaded.

2. Click Upload, and when the upload finishes and you get a little green check, click Close.

   

After the upload, you will have a file listed in your Train tab.

Using multiple CSV files

All your questions and answers can be in a single CSV file or in multiple files – it is the same to the bot.

But it may help your workflow to have them in multiple files, for example, if different people are working on different sets of questions. In addition, when the bot recognizes a question, it can determine in which file the question was defined and can provide a response specific to the file.

Click howtobuildachatbot-csv.

What you can see/do:

• You can see how many question-answer pairs you defined (113).

  

• For each question-answer pair you can:

  • Add or delete the entire question-answer pair
  • Disable the entire question-answer pair
  • Modify the questions by editing, adding questions, or deleting questions
  • Modify the answer

• Download all the question-answer pairs as a CSV file.

  

Go to the Build tab.

Every FAQ bot comes automatically with a set of helper skills for letting users ask questions. You can modify these for your use case.

• small-talk: Provides responses if the user says hello, goodbye, or thank you.

• customer-satisfaction-prompt: Provides responses to ask the user if the answer was helpful.

• customer-satisfaction-reply: Provides responses after asking the user if the answer was helpful.

• faq: Provides the appropriate answer based on the how sure the bot is that they understood what question the user was asking.

  • If the bot is sure (>=90%), the top-matched question-answer is returned.

  • If the bot is somewhat sure (between 90% and 5%), the top 3 possible questions are returned for the user to choose.

  • If the bot is completely flummoxed (<=5%), a message is returned saying the bot could not find the answer.

  {qna.faq.answers.0.question} specifies the top-ranked question. You can access the top 10 ranked questions and answers, specified with numbers 0-9.

Click the fly-out tab Test on the right and enter What is a skill?.

The bot indicates what it thinks is the question the user intended (highlighted above).

Below that are additional questions that the bot also considered as the intended question. If you open up the JSON view – JSON view slider at top of test area – you can see for each question how certain the bot was about whether the user was asking that question.

For the first question, the bot was 99% sure, so it showed this as the question the user was asking. The second question had 93% confidence, the next 90% and the next 88%.

After releasing the bot, you can monitor what questions people are asking and either:

• Add answers for these questions

• Add these questions to existing answers

1. Go to the Monitor tab.

2. Open the Test fly-out panel on the right.

3. In the chat, enter How do I use intents? and press Enter.

4. On the Monitor tab, click Refresh.

   

   You can see the latest conversation, the most recent what you just entered into the test.

5. Open the triangle on the right.

   

   You can see the top 3 best matches for what was entered (and you click to see the top 10 matches).

   But let’s say that we didn’t like how the bot assigned that question, we can assign it to another in the list.

6. Next to How would you recommend structuring an intent?, click Assign.

   In the dialog, click Assign, then click Done.

   

   Now enter again into the chat How do I use intents? This time it assigns it to a different question.

   

To learn even more, see the documentation Getting Started with FAQ Bot.