When adding training data, you often start with global training sources. These sources will then be used to answer questions across the board. However, it's possible that you also want to make use of topics when uploading training sources that relate to different products, internal vs. external use cases, etc.
When to use topics
Let’s take a look at some use cases. You might be working at a company with three completely different products. Uploading the related training sources all in one place could result in conflicting information. For example, if the products have different pricing structures or if one offers a free trial but the other two don’t, etc.
It can also be important to segment different users if they are supposed to have access to different (levels of) information. Examples could include your customer support team using the AI to answer support tickets vs. the end customers using the AI directly to receive answers to their questions. If you are a software service provider in the education sector, the information and support you provide to teachers and students will vary greatly.
Take note: In each topic, the AI will also search in the global training sources.
Adding a topic
Once at the Training data tab of the AI zone, you can click the Add a topic button and start by giving your topic a name and adding a description. You can then set whether you want the sources in this topic to be used to generate answers and in related content searches. You can also allow a topic to search in an additional topic. This is often meant for historical tickets, to be used by the customer support team inside the team assistant.
Once you’ve added a topic, you should be able to see it listed. Then, you can click Edit for that particular topic and add training sources as you normally would. Having added training data to your topic, it's time to test your AI on this topic.
On the training data page, click the test your AI button in the topics section and select the topic you want to test the AI on. Keep in mind, in each topic, the AI will also search the global training sources.
Enabling a topic
Now that you have a topic (or more), the next step is to enable them for the components you want. When you are in the editor for an component, you can scroll down to the Other tab where you can switch on Expert mode.
This will enable more fields across the different tabs of the editor. You can then click open the PrimaryButton tab where you should see the Enable AI segment(s) dropdown. Here, the default will be None, meaning the global training sources will be used. However, you have the option to select one or more topics from the dropdown menu.
If you select one topic here, that will directly be the topic that your end-users will be interacting with. If you select multiple topics, the end-user will first see the options and they can select one of the topics in which to have their conversation. You can think of this as similar to the self-segmentation feature we have for audiences.
