Adding search

Put your subject matter expertise to work by adding search. Search gives your assistant access to corporate data collections that it can mine for answers.

Your assistant can route complex customer inquiries as a search query. It finds information that is relevant to the query from an external data source and returns it to the assistant.

Add search to your assistant to prevent the assistant from having to say things like, I'm sorry. I can't help you with that. Instead, the assistant can query existing company documents or data to see whether any useful information can be found and shared with the customer.

You have four options to add search to your assistant:

The search integration for IBM Watson® Discovery. For more information, see Add the search integration for IBM Watson® Discovery.
The search integration for Elasticsearch. For more information, see Add the search integration for Elasticsearch.
The search integration for Custom service. For more information, see Add the search integration for Custom service.
A search extension for Coveo, Google, or NeuralSeek. For more information, see Add a search extension.

You can enhance the search integration by using the assistant capabilities such as Search trigger, No action matches and Conversational search.

For more information about implementing the enhancements for search integration, see Search integration enhancement.

Add the search integration for IBM Watson® Discovery

This feature is currently not available in the AI assistant builder of IBM watsonx Orchestrate.

Plus and Enterprise plans of watsonx Assistant include a built-in search integration that you can use with your additional, separate instance of IBM Watson® Discovery. You can embed your existing help content by integrating your assistant with search that is provided by IBM Watson® Discovery. This gives your assistant access to your organization's data collections that it can mine for answers. Customer questions are used as search queries to find relevant answers for your users.

For instructions on adding the built-in search integration, see IBM Watson® Discovery search integration setup.

Add the search integration for Elasticsearch

You can add the search integration for Elasticsearch if you have Plus or Enterprise plans of watsonx Assistant. Embedding your assistant with the search from Elasticsearch improves the data collection to provide accurate responses to customer queries.

You can add Elasticsearch from the Environments page or the Integrations page. For instructions on adding search integration for Elasticsearch, see Elasticsearch search integration setup.

Add the search integration for Custom service

You can add the search integration for Custom service if you have Plus or Enterprise plans of watsonx Assistant. With a Custom service integration, you can search for information using a search capability that you create. For instructions on adding search integration for Custom service, see Custom search integration setup.

Add a search extension

With a search extension, you can "bring your own search" and use content from your website, knowledge base, or content management system.

For instructions on adding a search extension, see: