Create an Empty Knowledge Base in QnA Maker

QnA Maker is a cloud-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) service that easily creates a natural conversational layer over your data. It can be used to find the most appropriate answer for any given natural language input, from your custom knowledge base (KB) of information.

You can create a QnA Maker knowledge base (KB) from your own content, such as FAQs or product manuals. In this post, we will be creating an empty Knowledge Base.

Prerequisites

Valid Azure Subscription. Create a free account here.

Create QnA Maker Service in Azure

Create a new resource group named SupportBotRG. Follow this post here to learn creating a resource group. A resource group is a container that holds related resources for an Azure solution.

Open the created resource group and click on New to add resources in it.

Search for QnA Maker and click on it.

Create the QnA Maker resource.

Fill the form with below values and click on Review + Create.

Name: Enter the name of your QnA Maker service (JDBotsQnAMaker).
Subscription: Select from the drop-down.
Pricing Tier: F0 (Free). For higher requirements select other pricing tiers accordingly.
Resource Group: Already selected. If not, select desired resource group from the drop-down.
Azure Search pricing tier: F (3 indexes).
Azure Search location : (Asia Pacific) Southeast Asia. Select a location that benefits you and your customer.
App Name: Pre-filled same as “Name“.
Website Location: (Asia Pacific) Southeast Asia. Select a location that benefits you and your customer.
App Insights: Disable. Enable to check how your app is performing, insights show powerful analytics tools for you to help to diagnose issues.

Review the details provided by you and click on Create.

By default, the QnA Maker service creates an App Service plan in S1 (Standard) pricing tier. Follow the below steps to change it to a free pricing tier.

Under your resource group. Select the resource with type App Service Plan.

Under Settings, select Scale up (App Service Plan).

Select F1 under Dev/Test and apply.

Creating Knowledge Base in QnA Maker Portal

Go to QnA Maker Portal and log in using the same credentials used in Azure Portal. Click on Create Knowledge Base.

Step 1 shown is already completed. Click on refresh in Step 2.

Select your Directory, Subscription, QnA Maker Service and Language.

Name your KB : SupportBotKB.

Populate your KB: You can provide a URL pointing to FAQs or upload a file that contains Question-Answer pairs. I will be populating later. Select None. Finally, Create your KB.

We have successfully created an empty Knowledge Base without any Question-Answer pairs. In the next part, we will populate this KB with some QnA pairs.