What's new in QnA Maker

Learn what's new in the service. These items may release notes, videos, blog posts, and other types of information. Bookmark this page to keep up-to-date with the service.

Note

The QnA Maker service is being retired on the 31st of March, 2025. A newer version of the question and answering capability is now available as part of Azure AI Language. For question answering capabilities within the Language Service, see question answering. Starting 1st October, 2022 you won’t be able to create new QnA Maker resources. For information on migrating existing QnA Maker knowledge bases to question answering, consult the migration guide.

Release notes

Learn what's new with QnA Maker.

November 2021

• Question answering is now generally available as a feature within Azure AI Language.
• Question answering is powered by state-of-the-art transformer models and Turing Natural Language models.
• The erstwhile QnA Maker product will be retired on 31st March 2025, and no new QnA Maker resources will be created beginning 1st October 2022.
• All existing QnA Maker customers are strongly advised to migrate their QnA Maker knowledge bases to Question answering as soon as possible to continue experiencing the best of QnA capabilities offered by Azure.

May 2021

• QnA Maker managed has been re-introduced as Custom question answering feature in Language resource.
• Custom question answering supports unstructured documents.
• Prebuilt API has been introduced to generate answers for user queries from document text passed via the API.

November 2020

• New version of QnA Maker launched in free Public Preview. Read more here.

• Simplified resource creation
• End to End region support
• Deep learnt ranking model
• Machine Reading Comprehension for precise answers

July 2020

• Metadata: OR logical combination of multiple metadata pairs
• Steps to configure Cognitive Search endpoints to be private, but still accessible to QnA Maker.
• Free Cognitive Search resources are removed after 90 days of inactivity.

June 2020

• Updated Power Virtual Agent tutorial for faster and easier steps

May 2020

• Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC)
• Rich-text editing for answers

March 2020

• TLS 1.2 is now enforced for all HTTP requests to this service. For more information, see Azure AI services security.

February 2020

• NPM package with GenerateAnswer API

November 2019

• US Government cloud support for QnA Maker
• Multi-turn feature in GA
• Chit-chat support available in tier-1 languages

October 2019

• Explicitly setting the language for all knowledge bases in the QnA Maker service.

September 2019

• Import and export with XLS file format.

June 2019

• Improved ranker model for French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese

April 2019

• Support website content extraction
• SharePoint document support from authenticated access

March 2019

• Active learning provides suggestions for new question alternatives based on real user questions
• Improved natural language processing (NLP) ranker model for English

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