Configuring cognitive insights for BMC Helix Chatbot

As an administrator or application business analyst, you can configure cognitive search as an alternative to full-text search (FTS). Cognitive search merges data from different locations and formats, and also normalizes and enriches the data. Your application users are more likely to find answers to questions because more of your scattered organizational information is made available to them. This enables your application to search in more than one data set.

BMC Helix Cognitive Automation provides support for external and BMC Helix Platform data sets in the cognitive search configuration of a chatbot application. A data set is a collection of documents. BMC Helix Platform supports the following types of data sets:

• External data sets: An external data set is information created outside of BMC Helix Platform. You can link multiple external data sets from multiple sources to your chatbots. For example, you can create a data set of articles in Remedy Knowledge Management; you can create a data set from the content of one or more websites; you can also create a data set that contain PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, PNG, TIFF, JPG, JSON, and HTML content.
• BMC Helix Platform data sets: The BMC Helix Platform data set is an internal data set that uses record instance data from BMC Helix Platform. You can create your own collections of knowledge articles specific to your business needs and include the BMC Helix Platform data sets in the cognitive search configuration of a chatbot application.

If you do not configure cognitive search for a chatbot application, the system performs FTS to provide the search results. To learn about the benefits of cognitive search, see  Leveraging cognitive insights in your application .

Before you begin

• Ensure that you purchase cognitive search from BMC Sales to use this service. 
  
• BMC Helix Platform cognitive settings must be configured for IBM Watson Assistant.
• Your must configure your chatbot to use an IBM Watson Assistant workspace. 

• You must download and optionally customize the HTML templates. BMC offers out-of-the-box HTML files to format the display of documents viewed from the chatbot search results. BMC Helix Platform supports only templates with HTML format. The templates are not available in the BMC Helix Chatbot UI, but are downloadable only from the BMC Helix Platform documentation. 

  Note

  If you want BMC Helix Chatbot to include articles from Remedy Knowledge Management and you have already crawled the articles by using IBM Watson Discovery Data Crawler, you must re-crawl the articles by using BMC crawler. For more information, see Installing and configuring the cognitive search data crawler for Remedy Knowledge Management articles .

  After re-crawling, you must apply the updated the display templates. For more information, see Configuring display templates for cognitive insights output .

  
  

Process for configuring cognitive search for BMC Helix Chatbot

The following table describes the tasks that you must perform to configure cognitive search for BMC Helix Chatbot:

 To configure cognitive search

1. Log in to BMC Helix Innovation Studio. 
2. On the Workspace tab, select the BMC Helix Chatbot application or custom application for which you set up the chatbot instances. 
3. Click the Chatbots tab and select the chatbot instance for which you want to configure the cognitive search.
4. On the Chatbot Configuration page, click the Search Settings tab. 
5. From the list of locales, click the locale of the chatbot application in which you want to configure cognitive search; for example, English.
6. On the Edit Bot Locale Search Settings page, set the following fields:
   1. In the Provider list, select Cognitive.
   2. In the Data Set field, select the external or BMC Helix Platform data sets or both that you want to include in the cognitive search.
      
   3. Click Save.
7. From the list of locales, select the locale for which you want to apply the display templates.
   
   
   
   The Display Template by Channel section displays two entries for each data set—one for the web channel and the other for the non-web channels.
   
8. From the Display Template by Channel section, do the following:

   1. Select an entry in the Data Set column.
      In this example, Template for Internal DS_Calbro.

   2. Click Upload Template, and browse to the location where you saved the out-of-the-box templates. 

   3. Select the HTML template that you want to apply for displaying knowledge articles of the selected channel, and click Open.
   4. Repeat the preceding steps for the remaining channels in the Display Template by Channel section to complete the configuration for cognitive search.

Verifying the applied templates

After you upload a display template for your web and non-web channels, you can perform the following test to verify that the knowledge articles are displayed as per your template.

• For a web channel: On the Chatbot Configuration page, click Launch Chatbot. The BMC Helix Chatbot UI is displayed in a new window. Enter a search term; for example, Internet. The chatbot displays snippets of articles, if available. Click an article and verify if the display is as per your template. You can also click the links for the article's attachments, if any, to verify that they are downloaded successfully.
• For a non-web channel: Launch your configured chatbot, such as Skype for Business. Enter a search term; for example, Internet. The chatbot displays snippets of articles, if available. Click an article. The chatbot displays the article in a new window. Verify if the display is as per your template. You can also click the links for the article's attachments, if any, to verify that they are downloaded successfully.

Troubleshooting

After configuring cognitive search, if search results are not displayed as expected, use the following checklist to troubleshoot the issues:

Unable to view the search results or irrelevant search results are displayed

• Check if the API key and the IBM Watson Assistant Skill ID is correct. 
• Check if the IBM Watson Discovery service credentials are correct.
• Check if the IBM Watson Discovery Collection IDs are correct.
• Check if you have selected Cognitive as the Provider in the Bot Locale Search Settings.
• Check if you have selected data sets in the Bot Locale Search Settings.
• On the Chatbot Configuration page > Search Settings tab, check if you have uploaded the correct templates. 
• If irrelevant search results are displayed, in IBM Watson Discovery,  improve the search result relevance . 

Related topics

Localizing chatbot conversations by using localized Chatbot Skills for each language

Utilizing multiple chatbots for each line of business