How Autocomplete Works

Conversational AI Cloud's Autocomplete functionality uses the list of Questions from your project, including those marked as FAQ. This list is used to create a dictionary of words (with a minimum of 3 letters) that are then published nightly as part of the regular publication process, to update the existing dictionary for that project. Conversational AI Cloud’s Autocomplete doesn’t work with a generic list but with a project-specific list, including all product names and such, which you would have added from your questions.

This functionality is available for all projects.

Autocomplete Example

So, let's assume you have a project with articles including the following questions (purely exemplary):

• 'How do I configure my modem'

• 'How do I control the impact of a modern virus'

• 'What does moderately viral mean'

Scenario 1: When a user types 'con' the code in the user interface (i.e. the internet page or app) will call Conversational AI Cloud's Type ahead with 'con' and return 'configure' and 'control'. Those will be presented to the user and he can opt to select the word he wants to be displayed into the input field.

Scenario 2: When a user types 'how', the same logic happens but there are no results, since there are no words in the Questions above starting with "how" other than the word 'how' itself. Consequently, this doesn't go any further as the word 'how' only contains 3 letters.

Scenario 3: When a user types 'com', the same logic happens but there are no results since no word in the Questions above matches a word that starts with 'com' and has more than 3 letters. The user might have meant to type 'con' but our Type ahead functionality just checks on what is typed in.

What Autocomplete (Type ahead) Does

The Autocomplete functionality is a feature to support a better user journey and enhance the user interface.

The Autocomplete functionality provides a list of suggestions based on the first letters that the user types. We’ve chosen to implement a standard of minimum 3 letters, thus preventing a lot of unneeded calls for words like 'I', 'it' or 'the'. We then return a list of 10 suggestions (maximum) of words that start with these 3 letters. The words stem from the Questions of your project and are thus project-specific.

What Autocomplete Doesn't Do

Autocomplete is not a spellchecker, nor does it provide a ‘did you mean’ functionality. It does however prevent spelling errors since users can select a word among the ones given.

Autocomplete is not an auto-correct, as it doesn't behave like a spellchecker which automatically replaces a wrongly spelled word if it’s (quite) sure what the spelling error was.

Autocomplete Limitations

• The list behind Conversational AI Cloud's Autocomplete does not include words that are defined in the entities; only the questions are used.

• Conversely, if your articles include non-standard spelling variations in their questions, those may show up in the Autocomplete.

• There’s no real logging at this point, but we’re monitoring its usage and performance.

• We don't implement a different character limitation. It’s set to 3 letters for all projects.

• Conversational AI Cloud's Autocomplete works based on words only. It does not take common phrases or complete user inquiries into account (like Google does).

• We don't implement custom dictionaries that clients may have.

• Conversational AI Cloud's Autocomplete is based on all the questions in the project, including the FAQ; we cannot 'tag' specific questions or words to not be included.

How to Implement Autocomplete

If you would like to have the Autocomplete feature implemented for your project, please send a ticket to Support.

This function is implemented by back end in the user interface by using a library like TypeAhead JS. Simply adding such a library and configuring it to talk to our API, will provide the TypeAhead behavior in your user interface.

Note: Make sure that any T9 or browser solutions are turned off since they might interfere.

Developer Documentation

View the developer documentation for this feature here.