>> In this special Build edition of the AI Show,
we will hear from Vishwac Sena Kannan,
Program Manager on the Bot Framework Team.
Vishwac will talk through the advanced understanding and
language generation capabilities offered by
the Bot Framework Composer. Make sure you tune in.
[MUSIC]
>> Hello, everyone. This is Neha Rajput.
I'm a product manager in QnA Maker.
I own the relevance and fundamental part of QnA Maker .
In Build 2020, I want to talk about
everything new that is coming up in QnA Maker.
This time we really focus on enhancing
the overall authoring experience of the developers.
So I'll talk about
all the new features that are going live in Build,
and then I'll also show you a quick demos of these cool features.
Then I'll talk about how QnA Maker is being used extensively in
situation like these to provide
information to people about COVID-19.
After that, we'll give you
a quick sneak peek of what we have available in private preview,
which is QnA Maker V2.
So there are basically two new features
that are going live in Build;
first is Rich Text Authoring,
and second is Role Based Access Control.
Now, let's check out each of these, in detail.
Now, this has been a long awaited feature by our customer.
I remember having calls with
different customers and MVPs and talking
about if they have any pinpoint
or any other feedback for the product.
As a feedback, I used to get quite a number of times like, "Hey,
can you improve the authoring experience,
or it's a bit difficult to write in a specific Markdown language?"
We took that feedback quite seriously,
and are now offering what-you-see-is-what-you-get
experience to the customer.
What I mean here is,
now you can improvise your answers in
the Knowledge Base present in the QnA Maker portal,
but different editing styles like you can add bold,
italics, un-ordered lists, ordered lists,
and several other features.
Now, let me show you
a quick demo of how you can do this Text Authoring.
You need to go to your QnA Maker portal
and open your Knowledge Base.
So for example, this is
my Knowledge Base where I was trying this Text Authoring,
and this is my answer.
If I click on the answer,
I can see lots of options available in the toolbar.
I can toggle it to Markdown view.
I can toggle back. I can add bold.
So this is in bold.
I can add italics.
I can do strike-through.
I can add a numbered list.
I can add bulleted list.
You can also do different type of headings over here.
For example, this Rich Text Authoring,
this is of type heading one,
then this is of type editor.
So you can choose different font as per your scenario.
You can add hyperlinks.
So the moment I click on this hyperlink,
it shows me the link that I've used.
You can quickly edit the link from
here or you can remove the hyperlink.
You can also render images over here.
So if I click on image,
it shows me the alternate text that I've provided for the image,
also the link for the image.
You can quickly edit the link from here or you can cancel it.
So if I click on these three dot,
it shows me more options for adding the hyperlink,
for adding more emojis.
You can undo and redo,
and do several other things that are provided over here.
Let me add one more QnA pair.
So for example, try out
the feature, enter the answer.
So it says, "Hey".
Let me make it a bold,
and then I can at least like one, two, and three.
So this is how easy it becomes
using the Rich Text Authoring because you can actually
visualize and write the text in
the manner you want without using a specific Markdown.
So what I did is I went ahead and
I published it on a team's channel,
and I created a bot out of it.
So let me show you that bot.
So this is the bot that I created.
I've already been chatting with it.
So for example, I asked more headings.
So it replied me with
the best suitable answer that was present in the Knowledge Base.
Then I asked capabilities of Rich Text Authoring,
then it shows me the exact answer that
we have created in the Knowledge Base.
So this is how easy it becomes using
the Rich Text Authoring experience
to create an answer from scratch,
because you can add
all the capabilities that are present over there.
Now, let's talk about
another feature that is going Gembed.
This feature, again has been asked by a lot of customers.
So if you have seven content authors to create the data,
what happen till now is you need to share the access to
the service to everyone with the cognitive service user role,
which means they get all the x's.
That is they can not only create or update the Knowledge Base,
but they can also go ahead and publish the Knowledge Base.
To control this, some customers created a walk around.
For example, I know some customers who use to create two services;
one test and one broad.
Varying the test, they add
all the content authors where they can iteratively improve
the quality of the Knowledge Base by adding or
updating QnA pairs and other information.
As Knowledge Base editing is an iterative process and once
the supervisor or the owner is
satisfied with the quality of the Knowledge Base,
they go ahead and export it to the broad service.
Then there are few customers, who allow
content authors to create content in Excel sheets,
and once they think that the content is ready for production,
they import it in the QnA Maker service.
Now, going ahead. With this feature,
we are providing those capabilities within
the service by adding two new roles;
editor role and reader role apart
from the existing cognitive service user role,
which is the one having all the permissions.
You can think of editor role as
the role that most of the content authors will get,
as they will be allowed to create, update,
test, and other functionalities apart from publishing the KB.
Reader role is the one with the minimum access.
Think of someone like a supervisor or a quality tester,
who will get this permission as they can
only read and test the service.
Now, publisher is the existing role,
who's the one with all the permission,
including publishing the Knowledge Base
and deleting that Knowledge Base.
Now, one thing to keep in mind is this is a service level setting.
Now, let me show you how can you provide access to
different people, or share your service with
different people with different roles assigned to them.
So all you need to do is go to your Azure portal,
and here, open your QnA Maker resource.
For example, this Admin QnA bot.
You can see the API type is QnA Maker.
So this is a QnA Maker resource.
Then go to access control.
Here, if you click on this "Roles" tab,
you can see there's a cognitive service user role,
which is the existing role that you get,
and then there are two more roles,
that is cognitive service QnA Maker reader,
cognitive services QnA Maker editor.
Now go to check x's, click on "Add",
add a role assignment,
select the type of role you want to give access with.
So for this demo,
I'll select "Reader",
and then add the ID of the person you want to give access to.
>> Then just click on "Save" and that person will
be provided the access with the role that you have selected.
Now, let me show you how each of
these role is different from the other one.
For this, I have created three different services,
one specific to each rule.
First one is with the Cognitive Service user role.
So let me show you that.
So here, for this Knowledge Base,
I have the role of Cognitive Service user.
So here you can see,
I can add to QnA pair,
I can add follow-up prompt,
I can add alternative phrasing,
I can publish the Knowledge Base.
I can actually do everything.
So this is the current existing role,
where as a content author,
I get access to almost everything
that is allowed to do on a Knowledge Base.
Now, let me show you how it is different from the editor role.
So here, with this service,
for this Knowledge Base,
I have the role of editor.
So you can see I can add QnA pair,
I can add follow-up prompt,
I can add alternative phrasing.
I can do almost everything except publishing the Knowledge Base.
So if I go and hover over the "Publish" button,
it shows this role does not have the permission for this action.
That means, as an editor I can create test,
update the Knowledge Base,
but all I cannot do is publishing the Knowledge Base.
Now, let me show you how it's different from the reader role.
So this is the third service with the reader role access.
So here as you can see,
there are a lot of options that are not available.
For example, I cannot add a QnA pair.
There's nothing over here.
I cannot add follow-up prompts.
I cannot add alternative phrasing.
I cannot even save and clean it.
So if I go and hover over there,
it says this role does not have the permission for this action.
I cannot even publish it.
Though I cannot publish as an editor also,
but reader has the minimum access,
so you cannot do anything except
reading the Knowledge Base and testing it.
Going ahead, let's see how QnA Maker is being used
to spread useful information among people about COVID-19.
In a situation like this,
where the whole world together is fighting
against a common enemy, COVID-19,
Microsoft is providing several out-of-box solution with
healthcare bot template which enables
customer to quickly create a bot in no time.
In addition, we have open source technology
and template for developers to create their own solutions.
Also, several third-party are creating
their own customer support solution
on top of Microsoft technology stack.
We're glad that QnA Maker is able to contribute to the cause,
as it's being used extensively across
the globe to provide general information to the people,
like what we should take care of,
common symptoms, and how we can protect ourself, efficiently.
One such example is
self checker bot, currently hosted on CDC website.
Another example is a conversational chat bot,
hosted on providence healthcare website,
where when you ask questions,
the bot is actually looking at
QnA Maker database and
responding with the best answer for the query.
In India, too, several state governments are building
general awareness bot, which answers
frequently asked questions about COVID-19.
One such example is COVA bot.
I will show you, shortly, how it spreads awareness among people.
Because of this, we have seen a huge spike in QnA Maker traffic.
Our engineering team is working dedicatedly to help
different customers to manage support tickets and maintain SLA.
It makes us proud that QnA Maker is
able to help people in these difficult times.
Now, let's jump to the demo off COVA chat bot that has been
created by one of the state government in India, Punjab.
So this is the COVA chat bot.
As you can see, there's a welcome message with
two options like health check and FAQ.
Now, if I click on "FAQ",
it shows me different options.
So I go ahead and click on "What is coronavirus",
it shows me the answer for the same.
Now, if I again select "FAQ" and this time,
if I opt for "Helpline number",
it shows me the Helpline number.
Now, if I select "FAQ" again, and this time,
if I select "Others",
then I can type my customized questions.
For example, now, I'll ask the bot,
should I continue to wear a mask?
So all these answers that are coming
from the bot are actually powered by QnA Maker.
So as you can see,
now I've typed a question and I got the answer for the same.
As it requires really low effort and
time to create a bot using QnA Maker,
it is the reason that
different government and health care centers are creating
general awareness through FAQ bots built over QnA Maker product.
This is a time to give you a quick sneak peek
in what we have to offer in private preview right now,
which is QnA Maker V2.
Today, QnA Maker has a self-hosted architecture where
customers are responsible for managing
their resources in their own subscription.
So whenever a customer on-board to QnA Maker,
they have to pay and manage apps services,
Azure self-service, and QnA Maker service separately.
With this service model,
which is currently in Private Preview,
customers does not need to handle this.
They can scale up and down in a seamless manner.
They just need to create one QnA Maker resource and
everything else will be handled by us behind the scenes.
Right now, as it's in Private Preview,
hence the resource is free.
As of now, QnA Maker management layer
is only presented in West US.
Though we don't store any data over there,
it's just for the Management APIs.
But with this service model,
we are offering end-to-end support in other regions as well.
For example, it is completely
available in North Europe in private preview.
Going forward, we are planning to add other regions, as well.
Now, QnA Maker V2 uses
state-of-art deep-learnt ranking model to enhance the relevance.
Now, currently, QnA Maker's extraction breaks the data into
QnA pairs which could sometime
contains large messages as the answer.
Now, here we are using
Machine Reading Comprehensions for precise answer,
which will return the precise answer span text,
as an answer to the query.
Let me show you how.
So here on the left,
you can see the current experience where we are returning
the exact message that is stored in QnA Maker as an answer,
whereas with MRC capability,
you can see the precise answer span is shown as an answer.
So for example, how much time does it take to charge the Surface?
All we're returning with
Machine Reading Comprehension is 2-4 hours. Isn't it awesome?
Now, if you're excited to try out
all these cool features that come along with QnA Maker V2,
here's the link to the form where you
can get your subscription whitelisted.
Just click on this link,
https://aka.ms/qnamakerv2signup and we'll go ahead and
whitelist your subscription.
This is all from QnA Maker.
I hope you liked it.
Signing off. Have a great day.
[MUSIC]