The AI Search Assistant (Assistant) is designed to help your community members rapidly find answers, discover resources, and interact with your content using advanced, conversational AI technology.
Key features
- Conversational Q&A: Users can ask questions in a natural, conversational way and the AI Search Assistant will search through your community's content (discussions, knowledge base articles, etc.) to deliver relevant summary responses.
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Unlike public AI search tools, the Assistant only indexes your community's internal content. This ensures answers are trustworthy and relevant, without “hallucinated” or out-of-context information.
- Reference & transparency: Every AI-generated answer is accompanied by source citations, allowing users to easily verify information and maintain confidence in accuracy.
- Security & privacy: The Assistant leverages secure LLM technologies (Azure OpenAI or IBM watsonx). User questions and answers are not used for external AI model training, and indexed data never leaves your community.
- Human collaboration loop: If the Assistant can’t answer a question directly, it encourages users to ask fellow community members by starting a new discussion. Responses to these questions are then added to the assistant’s knowledge for future searches, continually enriching your community content.
Access & chat with the Assistant
There are two ways to access the Assistant:
- Type a question or search term in your community's search bar; the Assistant will dynamically provide an answer to your query on the search results page. You can then launch the AI Search Assistant panel to chat further.
- Click the sparkle icon at the bottom right of any page to display the AI Search Assistant panel, where you can ask a query (more on this panel later).
Search results page
When searching via the search bar, the results page includes the Assistant's summary response above the regular search results, as shown below.
At this point, you can click the Launch chat or Refine search with AI Assistant buttons (highlighted below) to launch the AI Search Assistant panel; from here, you can begin a conversation with the Assistant to further refine or dig deeper into your query.
NOTE: On the right side of the page, you can view the sources the Assistant used to answer your query and click the Ask the Community button to have Vanilla automatically generate a post based on your query (more on this later).
AI Search Assistant panel overview
Whether reached via the sparkle icon
or from the search results page, the AI Search Assistant panel is where you converse with the Assistant, asking questions and follow up queries in as much detail as needed. Your "chat" is logged for easy reference, and you can scroll up and down to view each query and response.
Let's walk through the ways you can interact with the Assistant in the panel.
- Feedback: Click the thumbs up and thumbs down icons to give feedback about the Assistant's responses.
Your feedback is routed to our Product Development team to be reviewed, so that we can continue "teaching" the Assistant in order to improve responses.
- Copy: Click the clipboard icon to copy the Assistant's response to your clipboard for easy pasting/sharing elsewhere.
- Sources: Each response includes the sources used to give it; click the # Sources button to expand them. You can then click a source to view it, which can be one of your knowledge base articles or community content, like a discussion thread or comment.
- Autogenerate a post: If you're not getting the information you need or simply want to discuss with your fellow humans, click the Ask the Community button to have the Assistant generate a post for you based on your conversation. Refer to the example below to learn more.
Create post example
As you can see, we clicked the Ask the Community button and the Assistant generated a post for us automatically, based on our conversation.
- It analyzed each of our queries in the chat log to generate body text for our post.
- It selected the Post Type that best fits the content.
- It even generated a title for our post.
NOTE: You're still free to change the Post Type, title, and body text to suit your needs, but this often serves as a great starting point to reduce your workload.
Storing & clearing your conversations
Once you have a conversation, it remains stored in the Assistant panel. In fact, it remains:
- if the panel is closed,
- as you navigate your community, and
- even if you log out of your community and sign back in.
But what if you want to clear a conversation and start "fresh"?
- Currently, the Assistant panel does not feature a way to manually clear a conversation directly within the panel—though this is coming in the future.
- In the meantime, you can "reset" the panel by performing a new community search; each new search clears all previous content, allowing you to start a new conversation and, if needed, generate an associated community post with just this new context.