What's an external KB with LivePerson AI?

An external knowledge base with LivePerson AI:

  • Integrates with an external content management system (CMS)

  • Uses a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) engine to evaluate the articles in the knowledge base against the consumer’s utterance (the intent) and return the highest scoring article. Using the capabilities of NLU to do this work is recommended for the best consumer experience.

    When you add this type of knowledge base, some article information (e.g., title and article ID) is retrieved from the CMS and made visible within the KnowledgeAI application. The information isn’t editable, but it’s made visible because you need it to be able to perform some work, namely, to associate the articles with the intents in a domain and to train the knowledge base.

High-level workflow

When adding an external knowledge base with LivePerson AI, follow this high-level workflow:

  1. In Intent Manager, create the domain and the intents therein.
  2. In KnowledgeAI:
    1. Add the external knowledge base. During this step, you’ll specify the domain that you created in step 1.
    2. In the external knowledge base that you added, associate each article with an intent in the domain.
    3. Train the articles to match consumer utterances.
  3. Expose the articles to consumers by:

After making any changes to the content in the CMS, sync with the CMS (described below). This updates the knowledge base accordingly.

Add an external KB with LivePerson AI

To add an external knowledge base with LivePerson AI

  1. Click Add Knowledge Base in the upper-right corner.

  2. On the AI Enabled tab of the window that appears, select External Knowledge Base.

    Add a Knowledge Base window, where you specify the source name

  3. Specify the following:
    • Knowledge Base Name: Enter a descriptive name, e.g., “Technical Support FAQs.”
    • Content Provider: Select the name of the content provider. If the provider isn't listed, select "Other," and enter the name.
    • Domain: Select the name of the domain that contains the intents that you will associate with the articles.
    • Language: Select the language of the content. Make an accurate selection here; this helps text-based searches to work as expected and will help with regard to future enhancements related to text-based searches.

  4. Click Next.

    Add a Knowledge Base window, where you specify how to get the content metadata

  5. Define the request to fetch your content's metadata. The request should return a list of articles, and each article must contain a title and unique identifier. You can optionally retrieve tags and a category as well. An article can have multiple tags but exactly one category.
    • Method: Select the type of HTTP request method.
    • URL: Enter the request target, the URL.
    • Credential: Select the credential to use for authorization if applicable.
    • + Add Request Headers: Add any request headers to include in the request.
    • + Add Request Parameters: Add any request parameters to pass in the URL’s query string.
    • + Add Post Body: Enter the payload to send if applicable.

    • Transformation Spec: If you were able to select your Content Provider in Step 3 above, a default spec is provided here. You can use it if you haven't customized the CMS' data model. If you weren't able to select your content provider, a default spec isn't provided.

      Here, provide a Jolt transformation spec that can be used to "transform" the response into the LivePerson KnowledgeAI article schema. In other words, given the request, map the returned articles' metadata data model (schema) to the LivePerson KnowledgeAI data model.

    Note: Configure the connector payload to target only the content that you want to use as a part of this knowledge base. If you add the knowledge base with clear domain scoping — limiting the content as needed — the knowledge base will perform better and be easier to tune.

  6. Click Next.

    Add a Knowledge Base window, where you specify how to get the content

  7. Define the request for the on-demand retrieval of a single article. To pass the unique identifier of the article to retrieve, you must use the {externalArticleId} placeholder that's provided as per your CMS' API contract: in the URL, in the request parameters, or in the post body.

    The request should return a single article that must contain a title, a unique identifier, and at least one of these content attributes: summary, detail, contentURL, imageURL, videoURL, or audioURL.

    • Method: Select the type of HTTP request method.
    • URL: Enter the request target, the URL.
    • Credential: Select the credential to use for authorization if applicable.
    • Add Request Headers: Add any request headers to include in the request.
    • Add Request Parameters: Add any request parameters to pass in the URL’s query string.
    • Add Post Body: Enter the payload to send if applicable.
    • Cache Article Content: If you want to temporarily cache the article content that’s returned at run time for improved performance, select the duration in minutes.

    • Transformation Spec: Here again, if you were able to select your Content Provider in Step 3 above, a default spec is provided. You can use it if you haven't customized the CMS' data model. If you weren't able to select your content provider, a default spec isn't provided.

      Here, provide a Jolt transformation spec that can be used to "transform" the response into the LivePerson KnowledgeAI article schema. In other words, given the request, map the single article’s content data model (schema) to the LivePerson KnowledgeAI data model.

  8. Click Save.

Associate an article with an intent

You must associate articles with intents so that — during a knowledge base search at run time — the knowledge base can use an NLU engine to evaluate the consumer's utterance against the articles' intents to determine if there is a match. The highest scoring articles that are found in the search are then retrieved from the CMS.

An intent can't be used more than once, i.e., in more than one article.

To associate an article with an intent

  1. Open the knowledge base.
  2. Use the Articles page to find the article, and select it.

  3. Use the Intent dropdown to select the name of the intent to associate with the article. From this dropdown, you can also create the intent on-the-fly if needed.

    The Intent dropdown on the Article Configuration window

Sync with the CMS

Manually syncing with the CMS does the following:

  • Updates the existing articles
  • Adds new articles if there are any
  • Deletes all articles that aren't returned by the CMS but were stored during the previous sync

Sync with the CMS after making any changes to the content in the CMS so that the knowledge base is updated accordingly. Once you sync, you can add or update the intents associated with articles as needed.

For details on sync operations, check the knowledge base’s Change History page.

To sync with the CMS

  1. Open the knowledge base.
  2. Click Settings in the upper-left corner.
  3. Scroll down and expand More Options.
  4. Scroll down to Sync Articles, and click Sync icon.