Articles

Add an article

An article is a focused piece of content (a message) on a single topic that you want to serve to consumers.

To add an article to an internal knowledge base

1. Open the knowledge base.
2. Click Articles in the menu in the upper-left corner.
3. Click Add article in the upper-right corner.
4. Specify the following basic settings:
   • Title: Enter a complete sentence or question, e.g., "I can't remember my password." or, "Do we have a company org chart?" See farther below on this page for best practices.
   • Intent Qualifiers: This field is only shown if you're using Knowledge Base intents. Intent qualifiers are alternative ways that people ask for the article, i.e., alternative ways to communicate the same intent. See farther below on this page for best practices. Note: An intent qualifier can't be used more than once, i.e., in more than one article.
   • Intent: This field is only shown if the knowledge base is using Domain intents. Select the intent to associate with the article. See farther below on this page for best practices. If needed, you can use the Create intent option in the drop-down list to create the intent in Intent Manager from this location. Similarly, there's an Update training phrases link for updating the training phrases in Intent Manager from here. Note: An intent can't be used more than once, i.e., in more than one article. Also note that you don’t need to link your articles to intents right away, as the Intent field is optional. This is deliberate because it allows you to get started with a knowledge base by adding just the articles first. Then, you can create intents for the content you care about the most, and link those to the relevant articles. This means you can focus on specific content areas in your knowledge base, and manage the content overall with varying levels of effort on your part. The approach gives you flexibility as you maintain the knowledge base over time.
   • Summary: Enter a short response or message to be sent to the user. You can include web links, although depending on the channel they might not display correctly. For SMS/Messaging, you might need to show the URL by itself, not wrapped in HTML, since the HTML will be sent as plain text over these channels. You can use a subset of HTML in this field.
   • Detail: This field can be used to include longer messages to the user. For messaging, it's recommended that you keep the responses as brief as possible. You can use a subset of HTML in this field. To send the Detail content to the consumer, you must define a custom answer layout for the Knowledge AI interaction.
   • Category: To assign the article to a category, enter the category name. This lets you subsequently filter and find articles based on category in the KnowledgeAI application.
   • Tags: Tags are keywords, not sentences, that highlight the key noun(s) or word(s) in the title and intent qualifiers/training phrases. Tags can also be entities that you've defined in a domain in Intent Manager. To increase the accuracy of Knowledge Base search results, add tags. For example, for an article about health insurance, the tags should be "health", “insurance”, “benefits”. These should be words, not sentences.
5. If desired, click Advanced Settings, and specify the following:
   • Valid From and Valid To: If desired, specify in UTC the dates and times during which the article is active. To specify a finite time period, use both date settings. To specify an open-ended date range, omit the Valid To date. To activate an article immediately after you add it, omit the Valid From date. These settings work with the Enable Article setting to determine if and when the article is active.
   • Content: Use this field to send a hyperlink. Enter the URL here, and then configure the bot with the Knowledge Base integration accordingly. For help, see the next section.
   • Audio: Use this field to send an audio file. Enter the URL here, and then configure the bot with the Knowledge Base integration accordingly. For help, see the next section.
   • Image: Use this field to send an image. Enter the URL here, and then configure the bot with the Knowledge Base integration accordingly. For help, see the next section.
   • Video: Use this field to send a video. Enter the URL here, and then configure the bot with the Knowledge Base integration accordingly. For help, see the next section.

6. Click Save.

   By default, the article is disabled, which means it isn't returned in knowledge base searches in KnowledgeAI integrations. This is done to give you the opportunity to test the article before enabling it.

Add content links

You can use the content links in the Advanced Settings of an article to send rich content (hyperlink, audio, image, and/or video) along with an article.

Details on how to set this up follow below.

Configure the article

First, in the Advanced Settings of the article, enter the URLs to send (1).

The remainder of this information below is for the benefit of bot developers using a KnowledgeAI integration in a bot. However, there's a more powerful and simpler alternative that doesn't require a KnowledgeAI integration, namely, use of the Knowledge AI interaction in Conversation Builder.

Configure the KnowledgeAI integration in the bot

Next, open Conversation Builder and navigate to the KnowledgeAI integration inside the bot that uses the knowledge base.

Verify that the appropriate knowledge base is selected (2), and then add custom data fields for the content links that you're using (3).

The "article" custom data field is added automatically when you add the Knowledge Base integration, but in this step you need to manually add additional custom data fields for the content links. For the values, specify the paths to the URL nodes in the JSON, like we've done in the image below.

For the names of the JSON nodes for the content links, see the JSON reference farther below in this topic.

Configure the dialog in the bot

Next, still in Conversation Builder, build out the applicable dialog to make use of the additional content (4), i.e., use the custom data fields as you require. (For help on displaying variables in interactions, see this section.)

Preview the conversation

Use Conversation Builder's Preview tool to preview the conversation and verify the content is returned and rendered as you expect.

Useful techniques

Continuing our example, we've added some JavaScript so that, if there's a content link that is returned by the integration call, it is displayed. And if there isn't one, the conversation ends after the article is sent.

To accomplish this, in the Display Article interaction, we've configured the next action to be "End Interaction." Then, we've added some Post-Process code to that same interaction. The code (shown below) checks whether the content link (URL) exists, and, if it does, it changes the interaction's next action to be the following interaction.

Enable or disable an article

Enabled articles are returned by knowledge base searches in KnowledgeAI integrations, while disabled articles are not. That said, keep in mind that an enabled article is returned only if the article is active, i.e., if the current date and time in UTC falls within the time period specified by the article's Valid From and/or Valid To dates, if specified.

To enable or disable an article

1. Open the knowledge base, find the article, and click its title.
2. In the Edit Article window, scroll down to Enable Article.

3. Do either of the following:

   • Turn on (enable) the setting to enable the article.
   • Turn off (disable) the setting to disable the article.

JSON reference

The following table identifies the JSON node for article information that's often needed when you're integrating the knowledge base with a bot.

Name of UI field	Name of JSON node
Title	title
Summary	summary
Detail	detail
Content Links → Content	contentURL
Content Links → Image	imageURL
Content Links → Video	videoURL
Content Links → Audio	audioURL

Using entities within a knowledge base (Legacy)

This section is applicable to knowledge bases using Knowledge Base intents (i.e., intent qualifiers), which is a legacy feature. In this case, behind the scenes the LivePerson (Legacy) engine is used for intent matching.

For better performance and a more scalable solution, LivePerson recommends that you convert from Knowledge Base intents to Domain intents as soon as possible. This allows you to associate a domain that uses the LivePerson engine (or a third-party engine).

If you're using entities within your knowledge base (as discussed in this section), first convert the knowledge base to Domain intents. Then, if the domain itself uses LivePerson (Legacy), convert the domain to the LivePerson engine.

Entities are keywords that refer to a number of synonyms. For example, the entity SPORTS might have a number of synonyms, like walking, running, football, jogging, baseball, etc. When creating intent qualifiers and tags for your articles, you can leverage the power of entities as well.

Leveraging entities within a knowledge base provides the same benefits that doing so affords you elsewhere: They are a great way to make intents even broader, allowing the NLU to associate a group of words (like similar products, different misspellings of common words, and so on) with an entity instead of pattern matching to every single item in the group.

Create the domain

1. Navigate to Intent Manager.
2. Click New domain in the upper-right corner.
3. Enter a name for the domain, e.g., "Tutorial Domain."
4. Click Add Domain.

Create the entity

1. Inside the domain you just created, click Entities in the upper-left corner.
2. In the Add Entity panel, specify the following:
   • Entity name: Enter "CREDENTIALS."
   • Entity type: Select "Value Set," which is the default.
   • Entity values: Add the values below:
     • log in
     • login
     • pass word
     • password
     • user name
     • username
     • pin
3. Click Save.

Connect the domain to the knowledge base

Connect the domain to the knowledge base.

1. Exit Intent Manager, and return to Knowledge Base.
2. Open the knowledge base.
3. Click Settings in the upper-left corner.
4. Scroll down, and click More Options.
5. In the Associated Domain for Entity field, select the name of the domain you just created.
6. Click Update.

Use the entities in the knowledge base

In your articles, replace any word where you want the "CREDENTIALS" entity to be substituted in, including the tags. This might make some intent qualifiers and tags redundant, which means you can (and should) delete them.

Assume we have a knowledge base using Knowledge Base intents and an existing article with the following content:

Our article when taking advantage of entities would result in the following:

Note that we are able to reduce the number of intent qualifiers and tags while actually improving the success rate of our queries, as the "CREDENTIALS" entity will consider all of the entity values that were defined earlier.

You don't need to enter entities using all capital letters like we've done above, but it helps you to identify the words that are entities.

Now, when someone says an utterance that includes any of the entity synonyms, they should match. Try entering, "My pin doesn't work." This should return with a score of GOOD.

The entity values are cached, so if you add a number of entities but they aren't matching your articles right away, wait a minute or two. The cache should update.