| Announced on | Enrollment opens | EAP rollout begins |
| April 16, 2024 | April 16, 2024 | April 22, 2024 |
We are excited to announce the introduction of generative search for help center, currently available through our Early Access Program (EAP). When you perform a help center search, you can now see AI-generated answers directly within the search results page. With AI-generated quick answers at your fingertips, you can spend less time clicking and reading through articles to get the answers you need.
This announcement answers the following questions:
What’s changing?
When you enter a phrase or question into the search query field, generative search displays a quick answer above the search results. The answer is generated by OpenAI and is based on an article, post, or external content item (if federated search is configured) returned by Zendesk search. You can still access the full articles for more detailed information, but for many queries, the immediate answer will suffice.
There might be cases when there is no answer or the answer is inaccurate. The quality of a generated answer depends on the following:
- Quality of your knowledge base - Because generative answers are based on your help center and external content, the quality of the answer depends on the quality of your knowledge base. If there are no articles, posts, or external content that matches the search, an answer will not be generated.
- 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-word search queries.
Why is Zendesk making this change?
Ideally, your users or customers would rarely experience problems or challenges with your product. If they do, however, we want them to spend as little time as possible finding information to solve their problems. Surfacing answers from your help center content to end users in the search results page dramatically reduces their time to find a resolution to their problems, and results in fewer tickets.
What do I need to do?
You can sign up for the EAP via this form.
Once the EAP is enabled in your account, you must prepare your help center theme for generative search and activate generate search in Guide admin. See Generative search for help center (EAP).
We invite you to share feedback and report bugs in the dedicated community topic Zendesk EAP - Generative search in Help center.