Implement multi-turn conversation

Completed

Although you can often create an effective knowledge base that consists of individual question and answer pairs, sometimes you might need to ask follow-up questions to elicit more information from a user before presenting a definitive answer. This kind of interaction is referred to as a multi-turn conversation.

A diagram showing a multi-turn conversation.

You can enable multi-turn responses when importing questions and answers from an existing web page or document based on its structure, or you can explicitly define follow-up prompts and responses for existing question and answer pairs.

For example, suppose an initial question for a travel booking knowledge base is "How can I cancel a reservation?". A reservation might refer to a hotel or a flight, so a follow-up prompt is required to clarify this detail. The answer might consist of text such as "Cancellation policies depend on the type of reservation" and include follow-up prompts with links to answers about canceling flights and canceling hotels.

When you define a follow-up prompt for multi-turn conversation, you can link to an existing answer in the knowledge base or define a new answer specifically for the follow-up. You can also restrict the linked answer so that it is only ever displayed in the context of the multi-turn conversation initiated by the original question.