Introducing Question Answering in Public Preview
QnA Maker is an Azure Cognitive Service that allows you to create a conversational layer over your data in minutes.As part of ourAI at Scaleinitiative across Microsoft, weare makingthe latest breakthroughs in natural language understandingavailableacross our products and within our Azure Services portfolio. Powered by ourTuringnatural languagemodel,we areexcited tointroducethenewCustom Question Answeringfeature(public preview)withText Analytics. Alongside Custom question answering, we are also introducing anewPrebuiltQuestionansweringcapabilitythatlets users extract relevant answers to questions from a given passage of text. Overview Custom question answering supportsall capabilities introduced withQnA Maker managed. You canadd unstructured files to your knowledge baseswith Custom questionanswering. We are also introducing Prebuiltquestion answeringcapability thatlets users extract relevant answers to questions from a given passage of text. Enabling Custom question answering feature As Custom question answering is now a feature in Text Analytics, users should first visit the Text Analytics resourcecreate blade on Azure portal.They will have the option to enableCustom question answering featurewithin theresource.OncetheCustom question answeringfeatureis selected,theuserwill update all details related to the feature in the create blade.On creation,anew Text Analytics resource with Custom question answering featureis deployed. If usersdon’tenable the feature on resource creation,theywill have the option to enable the feature laterthroughtheFeaturestabofthe Text Analytics resourceblade.Theywill alsobe ableto disabletheCustom question answeringfeatureviatheFeaturestab. Support for unstructured documents WithCustom question answering(preview), we are introducing theability to add unstructured filesto the knowledgebases. Now the content author can ingest entire documents in the knowledgebase and when a user query is passed, a response is returnedon searching the documentsingested.The content authors don’t need to manageQnA pairs for unstructured documents. Take for instance the followingunstructureddocumentintroducing Surface Products:SurfaceBlog.The user can ingest this document in the knowledge base and test for user queries from the text.We tested this with a few queries as shown below. Prebuilt Question Answering Prebuilt question answeringprovidesusersthe capability to answerquestionsover a passage of text without having to create knowledge bases andmanage additional storage.This functionality is provided as an API and can be used without having to learn the details about QnA Maker.Given a user query and a block of text/passage the API will return an answer and precise answer (if available).We currently support the ability to pass text from 5 documents. API Updates We have added a new previewreleasefor v5.0 APIs:V5.0-preview.2.Users should access this version for unstructured documentssupportandpre-builtquestion answering. Pricing Custom question answering feature is free inpublic preview. However,userswill be charged forAzure cognitive searchtheyadd to the featureas per the tier selected. Notetoexisting QnA Maker managed users QnA Maker managedhas beenre-introduced asCustom question answering feature in Text Analytics. Going forward userswill notbe able to create a new QnA Maker managed resource.All new resources can be created byenablingCustom question answering feature with Text Analytics. All existing QnA Maker managed (preview) resources continue to work as before.The resource settings, portal, endpoints, keys, SDK, etc.pertaining to existing QnA Maker managed resources will work as is.There is no action requiredfrom the userat this point in time. We will continue to supportv5.0-preview.1for existing QnA Maker managed customers. If the users choose to migrate to Custom Question answering, they can do so. To migrate from QnA Maker managed to Custom question answering, users can create a Text Analytics resource with Custom question answering feature enabled andmigrate the knowledge basesfrom QnA Maker managed to the Text Analytics resource. Custom question answering (preview) continues to be offeredinfree public preview. Custom question answering (preview) is available in the following regions: South Central US North Europe Australia East References Set up a QnA Maker service - QnA Maker - Azure Cognitive Services | Microsoft Docs Configure QnA Maker service - QnA Maker - Azure Cognitive Services | Microsoft Docs Manage knowledge bases - QnA Maker - Azure Cognitive Services | Microsoft Docs Limits and boundaries - QnA Maker - Azure Cognitive Services | Microsoft Docs Prebuilt API
