Test your agent's knowledge sources

When you test an agent with knowledge sources, you automatically ground that agent with those knowledge sources.

After adding a knowledge source, use the Test your agent panel to see if it's working in your agent. You can only use knowledge sources with a Ready status in Test your agent.

Understanding knowledge status

• Ready: You can use this knowledge in the Test your agent panel.

• In progress: This knowledge source isn't ready for you to use in Test your agent. This status only applies to file upload and Dataverse knowledge sources.

• Unknown: The knowledge source is blocked for a few different reasons.

  • Dataverse search isn't enabled. Ask your administrator to turn on Dataverse search in your environment. Learn more in What is Dataverse search and Configure Dataverse search for your environment.
  • Incorrect authentication. Dataverse tables as knowledge sources require you to set your agent's authentication to Authenticate with Microsoft.
  • A data policy blocks this knowledge source and isn't available for use in Test your agent.

• Error: This knowledge source had problems while preparing. The problems could be due to one of the following reasons:

  • An unsupported file type or size. Check the supported formats and limits.
  • The knowledge source limit is reached.
  • The original source from OneDrive or SharePoint was deleted.
  • The file is encrypted or has a sensitivity label.
  • There's a product or system error. Delete the file and then reupload it.

  Learn more in Upload files as a knowledge source and Quotas and limits.

Test your agent's generative answers reach

1. Select Test.

2. In the Test your agent panel, ask your agent questions that take advantage of the generative answers capability.

Generative answers work well with a large variety of question types.

However, some types might produce less helpful responses, including:

• Personal questions.
• Questions that require authenticated access to content.
• Questions that have no related content at a specified URL.

Tip

To test specific knowledge sources, turn off all the other knowledge sources in your generative answers node except the one that you want to test. Then change the content moderation setting. Once you're done testing that specific knowledge source, reactivate the other knowledge sources that you think should be relevant in that generative answers node.

Forming questions

• Agents might have difficulty answering questions that require calculations, comparisons, or form submissions. Agents might not understand comparative and superlative terms such as better or best, latest, or cheapest in a question.

• If the agent can't generate an answer to a question, it prompts you to rephrase the question. After two of these prompts, the agent initiates the Escalate system topic. System topics are topics automatically included with each agent.

• To learn more about how Bing interprets the question against the URL you specify, add site: <your URL here> to the end of your question to see the top Bing results for the question.

• If your agent includes the legacy lesson topics, consider turning off or deleting these topics, since they might be invoked before any knowledge sources.

Tip

In your chat window, you can provide feedback on how well the AI does by selecting the "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" icon underneath the generated answer.

If you see an irrelevant or inappropriate generated response, select the thumbs down icon to let us know. You can also include more detailed feedback.

We use this feedback to improve the quality of the AI.

FAQ

These frequently asked questions (FAQ) describe how to diagnose your knowledge sources in a generative answers node.

Why isn't my agent answering questions by using knowledge sources?

In this scenario, verify the following settings:

• Ensure that you enable your knowledge sources in one or more of your generative answers nodes.

• Ensure that you don't exceed the maximum number of knowledge sources allowed for your generative answers node. Learn more in Supported knowledge sources.

• Ensure that Content moderation for your generative answers node is set to the correct level.

• If the Conversational boosting system topic isn't providing enough coverage, consider adding a new topic that uses trigger phrases built for your knowledge sources.

Known issue

A published agent might be using the latest unpublished updates of a Dataverse knowledge source.