Generative search provides AI-generated answers to search queries within your help center. Logged in users performing searches in the help center can use generative search to receive quick answers to their questions without having to click through multiple search results and scan through the related articles for an answer. Instead, they can enter a phrase or question in the search query field and review the resulting generated quick answer. Since the quick answer is derived from the primary search results, they can click into the articles for more information.
About generative search for help center
Once activated, generative search works by evaluating the question that a user enters in the help center search. The top matching articles, posts, and external content (on Enterprise plans where federated search is configured) are evaluated by OpenAI, which then generates an answer. The answer is posted at the top of the search results (see Using generative search for help center).
- Quality of your knowledge base - Because generative answers are based on your help center and external content, the quality of the quick answer depends on the quality of your knowledge base.
- Search input - Depending on the format and structure of the search query, you may not see a generated answer for every search. For the best results, avoid one- or two-word search queries, and instead, structure your search query as a phrase, sentence, or question. Additionally, if there are no articles, posts, or external content that matches the search, an answer will not be generated.
Updating your help center theme
- Copenhagen theme, you'll need to install an update to the Copenhagen theme from Github.
- Custom theme, you'll need to add the generative answers helper to your theme. The {{generative_answers}} helper is only available in the templating API v3 and above.
- In Guide, click the Customize design icon (
) in the sidebar.
The Themes page opens.
- Click Add theme in the upper-right corner.
- Click Add from GitHub.
- Enter the repository and branch name for the generative search for help
center theme update:
- Repository: zendesk/copenhagen_theme
- Branch name: generative_answers
- Click Import.
The theme is imported and appears on your Themes page.
To update your custom theme
- In Guide, click the Customize design icon (
) in the sidebar.
The Themes page opens.
- Click Customize on the theme you want to edit.
- Click Edit code.
- Under Templates, click search_results.hbs.
- Add the {{generative_answers}} helper code to the theme's
search_results.hbs template where you want the generative answers to appear: See
the image below for an example:
- Click Save.
- After activating, if you find that the Quick answer box UI doesn't match the
fonts and colors of your custom theme, this could be due to one of the
following:
- You have the required settings in the theme settings interface. However, the settings values are not set to match your theme, because your theme's look and feel is hardcoded in your CSS file. To update the color and font settings, see Branding your help center.
- You do not have some or all of the settings in the theme settings
interface. If this is the case, you'll need to add the settings and set
their values to match the rest of your theme. To do this, you can update your manifest.json file
with the following identifiers from Github, replacing the value of
each identifier with the font or color code that matches your theme:
- Color settings identifiers:
- text_color
- link_color
- hover_link_color
- visited_link_color
- Fonts settings identifiers
- heading_font
- text_font
- Color settings identifiers:
Activating the generative search for help center EAP
By default, generative search is not activated in your account. Guide admins can activate this feature in Search settings.
To activate generative search in your help center
- In Guide admin, click the Settings (
) icon in the sidebar, then select Search settings.
- Click Manage on the Quick answers search setting.
- Select Show quick answers for search queries.
- Click Save.
Using generative search for help center
When generative search is activated, users who are logged into your help center can enter questions or phrases in the search field and receive AI-generated quick answers to their question. Derived from the top search results for their query, quick answers show users the information they're looking for in the search results, without requiring them to open each link and scan through the articles for an answer.
Quick answers are posted in a box above the search results, alongside buttons that let users provide feedback about how helpful the answer is. Providing feedback helps train the AI to produce better answers in the future. You can also improve the quality of your answers by enhancing the content in your knowledge base. Generative search uses the content in your help center to produce answers, so as a result, the answer is only as good as your content.
- Log into your help center, then enter a question or phrase in the help
center search field and press Enter.
The search page opens, displaying the search results and, if available, an AI-generated quick answer.
If there is not enough information for AI to generate a Quick answer, you'll receive instructions to rephrase your search. If an answer is not generated, you can revise your search query to sound more like a question or phrase. For example, the search query "How long will it take?" will be more likely to generate an answer than the single search term "time".
- (Optional) Submit your feedback about the quick answer.
Feedback is retained for up to 90 days and is used to assess and improve the quality of answers produced by generated search.
- Click the thumbs-up icon
to indicate the answer was helpful.
- Click the thumbs-down icon
to indicate the answer was not helpful. Select the reason that best matches the reason for your rating. Type any additional feedback you may have, then click Submit feedback.
- Click the thumbs-up icon
61 comments
Elaine Tan
Love this feature, but just a waste that it is only for signed-in users. Please make this feature also available for all users!
4
Tetiana Gron
Jihoon Lee (이지훈) we are evaluating right now what languages we can support.
0
Shahrooz Kamali
Tetiana Gron , Great feature! What is your plan for providing a way to measure efficacy beyond simple thumbs up or down feedback? It would be fantastic to have an analytics dashboard that shows a list of user questions and chatbot answers. This is essential for measuring success and identifying content gaps.
0
Shahrooz Kamali
Emily Hillerman and Josef Prandstetter ,
Regarding your question on optimizing your help center content for AI, take a look at this article.
1
Josef Prandstetter
Shahrooz Kamali Thx a lot for the link - this is really worth reading.
Another article might be this one.
1
Tetiana Gron
Shahrooz Kamali we are considering implementing some analytics in Explore for this feature.
1
Shahrooz Kamali
Josef Prandstetter , great article, thank you for sharing!
Tetiana Gron , Thank you for the quick response! Do you have an estimated timeframe for the analytics? I learned from our Zendesk admins that we can export chat interactions and history via the ZD APIs, which we plan to do. My team of technical writers and knowledge managers is eager to use this data to make better content decisions. Who knows, we might even find a way to use AI to help us fine-tune our content and improve the AI-generated answers!
0
Tetiana Gron
Shahrooz Kamali We plan to add reporting on generative search, but I don't have a timeline. Right now, we are in the discovery stage and gathering feedback about it.
0
John Tieu
Two questions about future functionality for generative search:
1
Tetiana Gron
John Tieu thank you for feedback! I'll take note of it for further consideration as we continue to improve the feature.
Regarding the second point, I would suggest trying to apply labels.
0
Michael Lorch
Why is this feature only available for logged in users? This makes it hard and the login process for ZD Guide isn't exactly the best…smh
Requiring users to be signed in basically makes this a useless feature for us and for many other companies (judging by the comments). Any plans to enable this for non-signed in users?
1
David Bjorgen
James Pierce how did you set up a category filter on your search results page?
0
David Bjorgen
I hope the final product allows greater customization when it comes to styling.
0
David Bjorgen
Michael Lorch I'm assuming it has something to do with article permissions. You wouldn't want the AI to suggest an answer to the wrong user segment.
0
Heather Firth
Do you still need to sign up for early access? I manage the Guide and only want to activate the AI search. I've seen a summarise button on articles on other sites, too. Is this included?
0
Patrick Morgan
Any update on when ZD anticipates a wider non-EAP release for generative search? And any expectations for how pricing/packaging works? I'd hate to roll this out to users only to have to roll it back because we don't want to pay for the whole Advanced AI Add on :-/
0
Matt Russell
Hi Tetiana
**Update 12Sep24: After waiting ~24hrs, this appears to be working now (unless there was some other micro-outage I was not aware of). For future and for others following: do we need to wait a while for this to “kick in” after setting up the configuration as outlined below?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Orig message:
Could you help answer a query which I've seen asked by others in a few variations on this article? It is around the prevalence of the “Rephrase your search or add more details to help AI come up with a quick answer" response to questions that I would expect the AI to generate a reply for.
We have 9 brands in my instance.
All have Quick Answers enabled in Guide Admin across all 9.0
I have just ensured that all 9 active themes we are using have
All articles are “visible by everyone” (that's logged in).
2 of my 9 brands are returning expected “Quick Answer” content where as the remaining 7 are constantly throwing that “Rephrase your search” response, despite article results that appear beath that (traditional search)?
Thank you,
-Matt Russell
Customer Service Delivery Manager
0
Tetiana Gron
Hi everyone! Thank you for your interest in the generative search for HC EAP. You can still sign up. We are currently working on the pricing strategy and will share the details with you as soon as we are ready.
0
Zach Gilbert
Sorry Tetiana Gron , Just to clarify, this is going to be a pay-to-play feature and not included in the already high-priced AI add-on + the cost of AI-automated results?
0
Tetiana Gron
Matt Russell It's great to hear that the problem has been resolved. The feature should start working immediately after activation. We have a default callout to rephrase the search, not only when there is no answer but also when something fails on our side.
Should you encounter any issues with this EAP in the future, please create a post within this EAP topic, and I will generate a ticket so that we can investigate your particular case further.
0
Tetiana Gron
Zach Gilbert generative search for Agent Workspace will be included in Advanced AI add-on. Regarding generative search for help center, as mentioned earlier, we will announce the feature pricing when we are ready.
0
John Tieu
Hi - can you provide any insight on how impactful the thumbs up/down feedback is? How many thumbs down does it take to stop suggesting a quick answer? Is the impact weighted differently depending on the reason they chose for negative feedback?
Also, is there a way for us to review the free text feedback a user enters when they downvote?
2
Tetiana Gron
Hi John! We don't automatically update functionality based on feedback. Your feedback helps us iterate on the prompts we use for OpenAI. Right now, we don't offer reporting for gen search.
0
Dinesh Korgaokar
Do we have API for Generative-search
1
Martin Sachs
Hi Tetiana Gron - in May, you left a comment that the generative answer comes from the top 3 articles. If this is the case, how is the linked article chosen from the 3? Our testing is showing us that we are getting correct answers but the linked article isn't where the answer came from. It is returned in the top 3 and has a few keywords but the response itself is clearly from one of the other top 3 articles and not the one AI displays. We are seeing this same behavior in the Agent Generative search as well.
We'd love to understand this more as we plan for changes to our content structure.
0
John Baker
We're lacking reporting for the EAP feature, it would be nice to see customer prompts, GenAI responses, and related session events (did they view an article, did they vote on the GenAI response, did they submit a ticket, etc)
Long-term:
In addition, we hope to apply consistency to different AI-generated replies across your platform.
Today, we see an issue where the chatbot and the quick answer provide a mostly acceptable answer, but the quick answer does skip over an important troubleshooting step. This step is clearly documented and the chatbot metioned the important step, but the quick answer left it out.
The general concern is why GenAI is referencing the same article but leaving out important bits in its reply. How can we tag content to ensure certain content gets included in genAI responses?
0
Tetiana Gron
Thanks John Baker for feedback. Our roadmap includes extensive reporting related to the generative features. To stay on top of product releases please visit our What’s New page in the Help Center.
0
Judith Ilagan
Hi Tetiana,
I activated the generative search and its working on our end however we noticed that its no longer allowing us to switch from 1 language to another. We have 3 languages and users should be able to switch. Is this a bug or a restriction with the generative search?
0
Tetiana Gron
Judith Ilagan Could you please provide more details? There is a limitation with some Asian languages that we will address soon, but I am not sure if this is related to your issue.
0
Judith Ilagan
Hi Tetiana,
Here is our HC. Our default language is en-au. On the bottom, users can change language to GB or US. Depending on the language selected, the content of the article may slightly be different.
Before updating the HC, we can switch from 1 language to another now the language selection is not working.
0