How Can You Optimize Your Chatbot's Response Behavior?

An internal AI chatbot should provide precise answers based on a predefined knowledge foundation. However, like any AI chatbot, there is a risk of hallucinated answers or responses that don't quite fit the context. To understand how you can help optimize your bot's response behavior, it helps to understand exactly how AI answers are generated in the first place.

How Are AI Answers Generated?

For an AI to access knowledge, we feed it with documents. However, an AI doesn't read documents like a human does, but instead breaks down long texts into small, digestible units of information. These units are called chunks.

Imagine a thick rulebook. The AI virtually cuts this book into individual paragraphs. When a user searches for "Registration deadline Women 40", the AI specifically retrieves the chunks that contain this information.

When our developers want to trace how the AI's answers are generated in a client project, they can check precisely which chunks were used for each response. This makes the chatbot's behavior controllable and provides the starting point for optimizing response behavior.

The Optimization Cycle

Perfect response behavior doesn't happen overnight. It's an iterative process in which we, as a digital agency, closely accompany our clients. We analyze in the background when the AI selects which chunks. If an answer isn't optimal, we make adjustments.

To do this, we look at the metadata of the documents that form the knowledge base. For each file, we can see exactly how many chunks were created from it and what metadata is stored.

How Is This Metadata Structured?

• The document summary: It provides the global framework for the entire document, ensuring that each individual chunk always retains its context.

• The keywords: These are specific to each chunk and describe the concrete content of the respective section with concise keywords.

If the bot now delivers an imprecise or incorrect answer, we first look at which chunks the bot used to respond. Then we examine the metadata of the corresponding chunks and can supplement them.

After that, we retest: This only works through usage. Both we and our clients try to test through conversations with the bot how solid the knowledge is. If we're not yet satisfied with the given answers, we review the selected chunks again and make further improvements until the answer quality is right.

What You Can Do Yourself for Chatbot Quality

You are the key to precise chatbot answers. What can you do?

• Active testing: You know your specialist area and your customers best. Your feedback during the testing phase is the most valuable input for error-free response behavior of your chatbot.

• Self-contained paragraphs: Formulate paragraphs so that they make sense even in isolation. This ensures context when splitting into chunks.

• Avoid pronouns at the beginning of paragraphs: Phrases like "In this regard, it should be noted..." lead to context loss after splitting. The AI then no longer knows what was meant by "In this regard".

Would you like to make your company's knowledge available around the clock?

Let's examine together how we can optimally make your data available via a digital AI assistant.