BETA: Development of this feature is ongoing. Until complete, it will remain in a beta state.
While every organization wants their community's members to be at the forefront of engagement, there may be times when questions will not be answered as quickly as those asking them may need, resulting in users without the help they're looking for.
To help fill this occasional engagement gap, Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) created an AI to function as a content-contributing assistant, dynamically jumping in to provide helpful information in these scenarios. While not a replacement for member engagement, it is a helpful tool that can offer near real-time assistance.
Before we begin…
When it comes to AI, our community philosophy focuses on elevating human interaction, not replacing genuine human connection with AI; in that spirit, this feature is designed to work with questions that do not have any human-generated answers. It will not work with other discussion types or with questions that have been answered by a human.
Layout availability
AI Suggested Answers is only available for custom Question Pages layouts.
Is this feature right for your community?
Whether or not the AI assistant will be a positive, successful addition to your community depends on one primary factor: content. When a question is asked, the AI assistant scans your community's content looking for an appropriate source to share. Because of this, a broad spectrum of quality content is recommended to give the AI assistant enough knowledge to work with; in other words, the deeper the well of information, the better the AI assistant's suggestions will be.
The AI assistant can look for content in a variety of sources, such as your Vanilla community's posts and knowledge base.
TIP: If your Vanilla community is integrated with your external Zendesk knowledge base, that knowledge base is an additional source of content that can be mined via Vanilla's Zendesk Guide Search Connector.
If the repository of information your organization can offer the AI assistant is extensive and pertinent to the types of questions your users will be asking, the AI content assistant can be a dynamic and integral helper in keeping the engagement flowing in your Vanilla community.
How does the AI assistant work?
NOTE: This feature is not enabled by default; each organization can choose to enable it or not.
When enabled, administrators can customize various aspects of the AI assistant on a dedicated Dashboard page, which you'll learn about in the Customize your AI assistant's persona section below.
If enabled, the AI will provide near real-time assistance to users who ask a question in your community.
NOTE: The AI assistant only works with questions and no other post type.
Here's how it works:
- When a user asks a question, the AI assistant will scan through the sources of content you've given it access to, searching for answers based on the question's keywords.
- If the AI assistant found relevant information from the scan, it will provide up to 3 suggested answers to the user's question after the configured time delay is met (by default, it's within a few minutes). The suggestions display in a dedicated section on the page and are clearly labeled as AI-generated content, making it easy for users to understand what is AI vs. human answers.
NOTE: These suggestions are only visible to the user asking the question; only when accepted do they display for everyone.
- At this point, the user has a few options: if the AI assistant answered their question, click Accept Answer; if the suggestions aren't useful, click the X to remove them (if more suggestions are possible, it will produce more to replace those removed); or take no immediate action and wait to see if another user provides a better answer.
NOTE: Each suggested answer includes a link the user can click to review the source the AI used to provide it; it is always recommended to verify the source before accepting an answer.
Enable AI Suggested Answers
- Access the Dashboard.
- Navigate to Settings > Technical > AI Settings.
- Toggle ON the AI Suggested Answers option.
- (optional) It is a best practice to click the Review and Send link at the top of the page to send your users an in-app notification about changes to what AI tools your community is using. A template message is provided for you, but you can update it to provide additional information, if needed.
Refer to the sections below to learn how to configure several aspects of your AI content assistant.
IMPORTANT: Keep the following in mind when enabling AI Suggested Answers:
1. This feature is only available with Vanilla's new custom Question Pages layout.
2. AI Suggested Answers was released in 2024.019; any custom layouts created prior to this date will not include this feature. To leverage this feature in your community, make a new copy of the Question Pages layout.
Manage the Assistant's time delay and sources
On the AI Settings page (see above on how to access), click the settings button for AI Suggested Answers. This opens the AI Suggested Answers Settings dialog where you can manage its time delay and the source(s) it's allowed to use to answer questions.
Manage the Assistant's time delay
The first option to consider is whether to delay AI suggestions.
- By default (the 0 hours setting), answers are provided within a few minutes. The timeframe varies depending on (1) the amount of content in your community and (2) the sources you have allowed the AI to scan.
- If you would like to delay suggestions to provide adequate time for community members to respond, set the interval to hours or days and enter a corresponding number, such as 2 hours or 1 days.
NOTE: Click Save to apply your changes.
Manage your suggested answer sources
Does your organization have a broad spectrum of quality content the AI can leverage to provide insightful answers? This content can come from a variety of sources:
- your Vanilla Community's posts (user-generated content),
- your Vanilla Community's Knowledge Base (staff-produced documentation),
- and even an external source like an integrated Zendesk knowledge base.
The options in this section enable you to control which sources the AI assistant will use to provide its suggestions. This gives you the flexibility to give the AI assistant access to as much or as little of your organization's content as you want.
- Do you want the AI assistant to leverage all or some of your community's discussion content? If so, check the Community Discussion Categories box.
- Does your Vanilla Community include one or more Vanilla Knowledge Bases that contain information that would be beneficial to use? If so, check the Knowledge Bases box.
IMPORTANT: The Assistant can access and share ALL content in allowed Categories and Knowledge Bases, even if users don't have permission to see it. Because of this, if there is restricted or sensitive content in Categories or Knowledge Bases your users should not have access to, be sure to exclude them via the Excluded Categories and Excluded Knowledge Bases dropdowns, as needed.
- Is your Vanilla Community integrated with an external Zendesk knowledge base that you'd like the AI assistant to use? If so, check the Zendesk Knowledge Bases box.
IMPORTANT: If leveraging an external Zendesk knowledge base, you need to follow the steps outlined in our Zendesk Integration article for the AI assistant to be able to use it as a source.
You can mix and match these sources or limit the AI to only one. Choose a solution that works best for your organization.
NOTE: Click Save to apply your changes.
Customize your AI assistant's persona
On the AI Settings page (Dashboard > Settings > Technical > AI Settings), click the settings icon in the AI Persona area to manager the Assistant's name and icon.
NOTE: Your Assistant's current name and icon is previewed in this area. This "persona" will be displayed in AI Suggested Answers as the author of approved suggested answers and in the AI Search Assistant chat when responding to user questions. These settings let you customize how your AI appears across your community.
This allows you to personalize a "persona" for the Assistant to match your community's aesthetic and theme:
- Give the AI assistant an appropriate name.
- Upload an image to represent the AI assistant.
TIP: 4:3 ratio is recommended for images (400 x 300px); larger images will be resized.
For users: decide whether to use this feature
Each user can decide whether to leverage the AI Suggested Answers feature or not from their Profile > Account & Privacy Settings page:
- Scroll down to the AI Settings section at the bottom of the page.
- Check or uncheck the Allow AI tools to process my content box.
- When unchecked, your content will not be process at all, so Assistant will not suggest answers to your questions.
- When checked, you can then granularly decide which AI tools can process your content.
- Check or uncheck the Allow AI to Suggest Answers to my questions box to control whether the Assistant will offer suggestions to the questions you post in the community.
