Introduction

As a company or organization with a strong, online presence, it’s likely that you’ve invested heavily in a tool to manage your knowledge and content. This knowledge management system (KMS) or content management system (CMS) helps keep your content organized for easy updates. You’ve set up the system, trained your users on it, and socialized processes to make sure the content is complete, accurate, and follows your branding rules. So, it's naturally important to you that KnowledgeAI connect with this system, so you can leverage your vast knowledge and content in your Conversational AI solution. The good news is that all this is possible.

If your KMS or CMS has a public API for retrieving knowledge articles, you can integrate it with KnowledgeAI using LivePerson’s Integration Hub (iHub) application. iHub embeds Workato, a leading third-party enterprise automation platform, inside Conversational Cloud. What’s so special about Workato? Power. Flexibility. And a no-code/low-code approach to integration and automation.

In iHub, you can create a Workato recipe to sync the content in your external KMS/CMS into KnowledgeAI. Sync the content using a trigger, such as an automated schedule, or sync it on demand whenever you require it.

Terms and concepts

Internal knowledge bases

At LivePerson (and in this documentation), we classify a knowledge base that you integrate with an external KMS/CMS via a Workato integration in iHub as an “internal knowledge base.” This is because the content is stored internally within KnowledgeAI.

In the knowledge base’s settings, you’ll see “internal knowledge base” as the Knowledge base type.

The Knowledge base type setting in the knowledge base's settings

The term “internal knowledge base” isn’t used elsewhere in the UI. However, because there is also such a thing as an external knowledge base, we use the term to make the documentation simpler and communication faster and easier.

Be aware that you can also create an internal knowledge base by importing Web pages, PDFs, a Google sheet, or a CSV file. Or, you do so by adding articles manually within KnowledgeAI. These too are internal knowledge bases because the content is stored internally within KnowledgeAI.

Projects

In Workato, a project is a container for a set of related workflows, recipes, and automation tasks. Create a project to store assets related to the integration.

Example projects

LivePerson recommends that you create one project to store all your KnowledgeAI-related assets. But it’s up to you. Organize things however is easiest for you.

Recipes

In Workato, a recipe is a pre-built automation workflow that connects different applications and systems to perform specific tasks or processes. It consists of triggers that initiate the workflow, actions that define what should happen, and conditions or logic to control the flow of data and information between connected applications.

Example recipe

Recipes simplify integration and automation by providing a structured way to create and manage workflows without the need for extensive coding or development expertise.

To integrate your KMS/CMS with KnowledgeAI, you must create a recipe that:

  1. Retrieves the content from your KMS/CMS
  2. Maps it to our LivePerson data schema for articles
  3. Imports the content into a knowledge base in KnowledgeAI

Templates and customization

LivePerson offers both generic and vendor-specific templates to make integration with KnowledgeAI easier.

Example templates

Take advantage of a template; don’t start from scratch. That said, feel free to customize and extend the recipe however you need. For example, you might want to alter it to send an email to an email address whenever a job fails.

To help you quickly understand how a template works, all of the templates are self-documenting. That is, they include comments that describe the various triggers and actions.

Integrate with an external KMS/CMS

Prerequisite steps

New to embedded Workato in the Integration Hub (iHub)? Get acquainted by reviewing the general user guide in our Knowledge Center.

Step 1: In KnowledgeAI, create the knowledge base

  1. Open KnowledgeAI, and click Add knowledge base in the upper-right corner.
  2. Fill out the form, and select “External KMS/CMS” for Content source.

    The Add Knowledge Base form, with a callout to the Content Source setting

  3. Click Save.
  4. In the window that appears, use the Copy icon to copy your account ID, the knowledge base ID, and the client secret to the clipboard. (The client secret is used by Workato to authenticate with KnowledgeAI.) Paste the info somewhere for easy reference.

    Don’t skip this step. You can always get the knowledge base ID from the Settings page for the knowledge base. But, for security reasons, this is the only opportunity to get the client secret.

    The window that contains the info to copy: Account ID, Knowledge base ID, and client secret

  5. Click Go to iHub.

Step 2: In iHub, activate embedded Workato

This is a step that you only perform once in iHub. It creates the Workato tenant for your account within the mult-tenancy Workato architecture. It also creates an admin user for your account. More users are created on the fly as needed. Learn more about all of this in the iHub Workato user guide in our Knowledge Center.

  1. On the left navigation bar, click Manage > Integration Hub.
  2. Click Workflows in the menu in the upper-left corner.
  3. Click Activate to activate our embedded Workato workspace inside Conversational Cloud.

    The Activate button

  4. Review and accept the terms of service by clicking the available checkbox. Then click Accept.

    The window on which to review and accept terms

  5. Click Enter Workato.

    The Enter Workato button

Step 3: In iHub, create a project

LivePerson recommends that you create one project to store all your KnowledgeAI-related assets. But it’s up to you. Organize things however is easiest for you.

  1. Under Workflows, select Assets.
  2. Beside PROJECTS on the left, click the “ + “ sign.
  3. Enter a name and description for the project.

    The form to fill out to create a project

  4. Click Create project.

Step 5: In iHub, create the Workato recipe

In this step, you create the Workato recipe that imports content from your external KMS/CMS into the knowledge base that you created in KnowledgeAI.

  1. Click Community Library on the menu bar.
  2. Enter the search term "liveperson" to search for the KnowledgeAI recipe templates.
  3. Select the recipe you need.

    Example templates

  4. Click Use this recipe in the upper-right corner.

    The Use this recipe button

  5. Select the project in which to copy the recipe, and click Copy and save.

    The Copy and save button

  6. Click Customize recipe to begin customization.

    The Customize recipe button

    Customizing a recipe

  7. Before you get too far along with customization, change the recipe name to something descriptive and meaningful to your brand.

    The recipe name field

Key customization points

The comments in the elements in the recipe guide you through customization. However, the following are the key customization points.

Trigger - Specify a schedule

Below TRIGGER, click the “Trigger on a custom schedule” element. Edit it to specify the schedule on which to run the recipe.

Specifying the trigger for running the recipe

Action - Get the content from the KMS/CMS

Below ACTIONS, locate and click the “Select an app and action” element (or similarly named element depending on the template). Edit the element:

  1. Select the application (KMS or CMS) to connect to.
  2. Select the action that retrieves the content from the KMS or CMS.
  3. Create the new connection to the KMS or CMS.
  4. Configure any extra settings as required.

Configuring the element that retrieves the content from the CMS

Action - Map the content to the LivePerson article schema

Locate and click the “Add items to articles list” element (or similarly named element depending on the template). In the element, map the KMS/CMS article schema to the KnowledgeAI fields provided.

Configuring the element that maps the retrieved article content to the KnowledgeAI article schema

Action - Add the content to the knowledge base in KnowledgeAI

Locate and click the “Add all articles to LivePerson KAI” element (or similarly named element depending on the template). Edit the element:

  1. Connect to KnowledgeAI. Here, you’ll use the info that you recorded earlier (account ID, knowledge base ID, and client secret) for the knowledge base that you created in KnowledgeAI.
  2. Configure any extra settings as required.

    Configuring the element that imports the retrieved content into KnowledgeAI

Under Setup, take note of the isFullKB field:

The isFullKB setting

By default, isFullKB is set to “Yes” (true). This means the import works a lot like when importing a Google sheet or CSV file. Specifically, it’s a complete overwrite of the contents in the knowledge base using the contents of the KMS/CMS. So adds, updates, and deletes do occur.

The API enables all new articles, so ensure the content is suitable before the recipe is run.

Step 6: In iHub, test and debug the recipe

In the upper-right corner, click Test recipe to test the recipe.

The test performs an actual run of the recipe, so this results in updates to the knowledge base in KnowledgeAI.

The Test Recipe button

If you don’t get a success message, debug the recipe and try again after fixing it.

A success message after testing the recipe

Step 7: In KnowledgeAI, verify the articles

As a final step, go to the knowledge base in KnowledgeAI, and verify the articles are there and look as expected.

Request payload

{
    "articles": [
        {
            "title": "title",
            "summary": "summary",
            "isDelete": "true/false"
            //....
        }
    ],
    "isFullKb": "true/false",
    "kbId" : "<<kbId>>"
}

Success response payload

{
   "success": true,
   "errorCode": "200",
   "successResult": {
       "Success": "STARTED",
       "correlationId" : "xxxxxxxxx"
}
}

Response statuses

There is no response body for non-200 status codes.

Status code Description
200 Success response
400 Bad request; request validation failures
401 Not authorized to access the resource
404 Requested response not found; knowledge base data source is not found for the given ID; no content source of KMS type found for a given knowledge base ID
429 Too many requests
500 Internal server error

Manually run a recipe

You can manually run a recipe at any time. This option is available in several prominent spots, like this one below:

The Start recipe button

Reporting

Use the dashboard to check the results of jobs:

An example dashboard showing some successful jobs and some failed jobs

Troubleshooting

Within a recipe, use the Jobs page to drill down to errors that occurred:

The Jobs page

On the Jobs page, click the error to navigate to the problematic element.

Then use the Input, Error, and Debug panels to help you understand and solve the problem.

The Input panel

Best practices

  • Monitoring: Check iHub on a regular basis to verify that your jobs are running successfully. iHub is where you determine this, as errors aren’t reported in KnowledgeAI. They’re reported in iHub. That said, it’s also a best practice to regularly verify that the content in KnowledgeAI looks as expected.
  • Minor changes: Go ahead and make these directly in the relevant recipe.
  • Major changes: To make these, we recommend that you clone the recipe, make the changes in the copy, and then replace the original recipe after testing has proven to be successful.

FAQs

Can I use KnowledgeAI to manually add articles to the internal knowledge base?

Yes, you can. But be aware that those articles aren’t updated when the recipe runs.

The impact to manually added articles really depends entirely on the recipe’s configuration. For example, if you customize the recipe to first remove all the articles in the knowledge base before updating the knowledge base with what’s in the KMS/CMS, then the manually added articles will be deleted.