Training Your Assistant to Make it Smarter

For many different reasons, your visitors may have questions that your content (and by extension your Frase Assistant) is not capable of answering. 

In these scenarios, you want to make sure that you're providing your Assistant with the context it needs to provide a frictionless experience. This guide will walk you through the steps you should take to make your Assistant even smarter than your website's content.

More specifically, we'll cover: 

  • Creating your First Dataset
  • Periodically Training your Assistant 
    • Training incorrect or unknown answers
      • Training new answers 
      • Training answers as variants 
      • Training answers off URL's

Creating Your First Dataset

A dataset is a list of question and answer pairings that allow you to provide specific "trained" answers to specific questions. Creating a dataset at the outset will make sure your Assistant is ready to answer common questions right out of the gate. 

To create your first dataset, follow the steps below: 

1. Create a Dataset

Navigate to "Knowledge" and click "New Dataset".

You will have to name your Dataset, and connect to an existing Assistant.

2. Train New Answers

Think of your Dataset as a collection of FAQs that are connected to your Assistant's knowledge base.

After connecting the dataset, click "New Question" to train your first answer in that dataset. The answer training module has a few options:

  • Dataset: shows the dataset selected for training
  • Question: the question you want to train an answer for
  • New Answer: the body of a "new" answer, meaning the answer is not already in your dataset and you are creating a new one. You can include media (images and videos) in this section by clicking the plus icon when starting to type.
  • Variant of existing: you can apply an answer that's already in your dataset, typing in the field will autopopulate a pre-existing answer (if it's already in your dataset) that you can select.
  • URL Destination: train the answer to have a certain URL populate when the question is asked.
  • Buttons: call-to-action buttons with button text and hyperlinks, click "+ Add button" to add one.
  • Embed: embed HTML code
  • Follow-up: this allows to display buttons that are connected to other trained answers.
  • Email Capture: display email capture form after providing the answer.
  • Live Chat: display live chat call-to-action after providing the answer.

Periodically Training Your Assistant

To ensure that your Assistant remains up-to-snuff, it's important that you periodically train it. By training your Assistant once or twice a week, it will become smarter and will be able to answer a wider variety of questions. 

Training Answers - Navigate to Feed and Train

To get started, navigate to your Assistant Settings page, click "View Analytics" button and then select the "Feed" option to see a full list of questions coming into your assistant. Or navigate to the Overview section and click "Go to Analytics" or "Go to Full Feed".

Then, for each question your visitor asked, review the answer the Assistant provided. If it's incorrect/unknown and you'd like to adjust it, train the answer by selecting the question from the feed and then clicking the pencil icon shown in the screenshot below.

Types of Training

There are a few different options to train wrong/unknown answers: Training a New Answer, Training an Answer as a Variant and Training an Answer as a URL Destination.

Training New Answers

After you click the pencil icon, you should be prompted with the training window shown in the screenshot below. Start by selecting the dataset you wish to update. You can use the "Advanced Customization" options which were explained earlier in this article. 

Training a new answer means you don't have the answer in your pre-existing dataset or website crawl, and creating a new answer will then add it to your dataset for future use. 

Training Answers as Variants 

Occasionally, you'll want to train an incorrect answer as a variant of an answer you've already trained. 

Sounds confusing, so here's an example. Imagine, last week someone asked "How do I contact Support" and you trained your Assistant to respond "You can contact our support team by emailing support@example.com." Now, this week, a different user has asked you Assistant "Can I talk to a human" and has gotten an incorrect answer.

Instead of training the same answer twice in this scenario, you can train your Assistant to recognize the question "Can I talk to a human" as a variant of the question "How do I contact Support." In such scenarios, your Assistant will provide the same answer to both questions.

To train an answer as a variant, simply "Variant of Existing" instead of "New Answer" on the training screen. 

Start typing and Frase will automatically populate existing questions for you to choose from.

Training Answers off URL's

Sometimes your Assistant gets an answer wrong when there's content available that's capable of providing the correct answer.

If this happens, you can direct the Assistant's attention to the URL that contains the correct answer. Next time that question is asked, Frase will only look at that URL when looking for an answer. 

Training via a URL destination is the simplest training method, just click "URL Destination" and enter the URL of your choice shown in the screenshot below.