Configuring cognitive search for BMC Helix Virtual Agent

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 likelier to find answers to questions because more of your scattered organizational information is available. This enables your application to search in more than one data set. Configuring the cognitive search is available only if you have IBM Watson assistant configured in your environment.

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

  • External data sets: An external data set is information created outside of BMC Helix Innovation Suite. You can link multiple external data sets from multiple sources to your chatbots. For example, you can create a data set of articles in BMC Helix Knowledge Management; you can create a data set from the content of one or more websites; you can also create a data set that contains PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, PNG, TIFF, JPG, JSON, and HTML content.

  • BMC Helix Innovation Suite

     data sets: The BMC Helix Innovation Suite data set is an internal data set that uses record instance data from BMC Helix Innovation Suite. You can create your collections of knowledge articles specific to your business needs and include the BMC Helix Innovation Suite 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 search in your application.

Related Topics

Before you begin

  • Ensure that you purchase cognitive search from BMC Sales to use this service. 
  • BMC Helix Innovation Suite 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 Innovation Suite supports only templates with HTML format. The templates are not available in the BMC Helix Virtual Agent UI, but are downloadable only from the BMC Helix Innovation Suite documentation. 

    Note

    If you want BMC Helix Virtual Agent to include articles from BMC Helix 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 BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management articles.

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

Process for configuring cognitive search for BMC Helix Virtual Agent

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

Task

Product

Action

Reference

1

IBM Watson Discovery

Procure the IBM Watson Discovery license from BMC Sales.

  • Contact your BMC Account Manager.

2.

BMC Helix Innovation Suite

As an administrator, configure BMC Helix Innovation Suite with IBM Watson Discovery service credentials. 

3.

IBM Watson Discovery

As an administrator, add content to IBM Watson Discovery.

4.

IBM Watson Discovery

(Optional task) As an administrator or application business analyst, annotate fields in your documents for improved search results, customize how your documents are indexed by using the Smart Document Understanding.

5.

IBM Watson Discovery

As an administrator, note down the IBM Watson Discovery collection ID for each collection that you want your chatbot to search.

  • In IBM Watson Discovery, on the Overview page of each collection, click the API button, copy the Collection ID, and save it for use in subsequent tasks. 

6.

BMC Helix Innovation Suite

Create an in-bundle setting in the application so that administrators can define the search data sets.

7.

BMC Helix Innovation Suite

As an administrator or application business analyst, ensure that the documents added in IBM Watson Discovery are used in cognitive search, and define these search data sets. 

8.

BMC Helix Innovation Suite

As an application business analyst, define the display format of documents for each data set, download the templates and, if required, configure them.

9.

BMC Helix Innovation Suite

As an administrator or application business analyst, define cognitive search for your chatbot application.

10.

BMC Helix Innovation Suite

As an administrator or application business analyst, if you are using multiple chatbots, configure each chatbot.

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 Virtual Agent 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.

 

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