Create a Knowledge Base in QnA Maker

In this article, I will take you through the steps you need to follow in order to create a Knowledge Base using QnAMaker.

Creating a KB in QnA Maker is the first step towards creating a bot or a virtual agent. You might have different reasons why you would want to have a virtual agent which responds to some predefined answers.

Whether it is to automate your recurrent requests in your help desk system or providing your users with an easy mean to interact with a bot and provide answers to frequently asked questions, it is always a good approach to have your users requests processed firstly by a bot, if this last is unable to provide the users with an acceptable response, your support team can jump in and provide the required support.

Create a knowledge base in QnAMaker.ai

Navigate to QnAMaker.io
Login using your Microsoft Account (you need to have an active Azure subscription to continue)
Once logged in, you will see the following home page

Create a knowledge base in QnA Maker

From the top navigation, select “Create a knowledge base“
This will take you through the following wizard

The first step in this wizard, would be to create an Azure QnA Service (if you have not done this yet).
Click “Create a QnA Service“, which will open a new tab pointing to the Create a new resource in Azure, which is as follow

Create the QnA Service in Azure

In this wizard you will need to provide the following details:
- Subscription : Select in which subscription this resource will be created.
- Resource Group : pick or create the resource group for the new resource.
- Name : The name of the new resource.
- Pricing tier : This will impact the performances, and the higher pricing tier you select, the better performances.
- Azure Search Location : Geographical area where the search index will be stored.
- Azure Search pricing tier : Same here, the higher the pricing tier, the higher indexing power you will have.
- App name : Provide a name to your App Service
- Website location : The geographical location of your app service web site.
Provide and set your settings and click “Review + Create“.
Once your QnA Service created, go back to the QnA Maker tab and complete the wizard steps.

Pick your newly created QnA Service

In Step 2, select your newly created QnA Service

In Step 3, just provide a name for your knowledge base

Define your knowledge base source

Step 4 would be the most important, in which you will need to populate the following

You can define the source of frequently asked questions, these can be brought from a remote url or from a structured file.
In this example, I am pointing to my other article in which I aggregated Teams frequently asked question.
Chit-Chat section defines how your bot will respond to the users and the behaviour of the bot.

Well done ! you have created your first knowledge base.

Once done, you will see a screen with all your questions/answers, at this stage you have the possibility QnA Maker of amending these questions/answers or adding manually the ones you want.