Answers API Overview

Introduction

Welcome to the eGain Answers API Guide. The Answers API allows enterprises to deliver fast, accurate, and contextual responses powered by their organizational knowledge. It supports two complementary approaches:

  • Certified Answers : Direct snippets retrieved from enterprise-authored content.
  • Generative Answers : Natural language responses synthesized by a large language model (LLM).

Every response includes supporting search results, references, and confidence scores—ensuring transparency, trust, and traceability. The API is built for secure, scalable integration across enterprise environments.

What It’s Used For

Organizations use the Answers API to make knowledge more accessible and actionable across different channels. By leveraging both certified and generative answering modes, businesses can:

  • Provide consistent, trusted responses across web, mobile, chatbots, and portals.
  • Scale customer support without compromising accuracy.
  • Empower employees with instant access to critical knowledge.
  • Enforce compliance by grounding answers in approved content.

Common Use Cases

  • Customer Support Automation : Power chatbots or virtual agents with context-driven answers—reducing costs and improving first-contact resolution.
  • Employee Knowledge Retrieval : Help employees quickly access policies, technical guides, or internal procedures.
  • Self-Service Portals : Enable customers to find answers directly in product manuals, help centers, or FAQs.
  • Compliance and Policy Access : Ensure teams always see approved and up-to-date regulatory or policy information.
  • Research and Analysis : Surface insights from large collections of reports or reference material.

Overall Workflow

  1. User Query Submitted
    • A query is sent to the API via web, mobile, chatbot, or other applications.
  2. Certified Answer Attempt
    • The system first searches enterprise-authored content for a direct, high-confidence snippet.
    • Articles are filtered by articleType 'FAQ' to ensure domain relevance.
  3. Fallback to Generative Answer
    • If no certified answer meets the confidence threshold, the query and relevant content are sent to the LLM.
    • The LLM generates a natural language response, grounded in retrieved content.
  4. Supporting Results Included
    • The response includes references, supporting snippets, and relevance scores for transparency.
  5. Answer Delivered
    • The final certified or generative answer is returned to the calling application.

Next Steps

Take a deeper dive into the capabilities of the Answers API.

  • Filters : Understand how to narrow results using articleType, topicIds, tags, and user context for precise, personalized answers.
  • Certified Answers : Learn how the API processes queries through Certified and Generative pipelines, and how fallback logic ensures reliable results.
  • Generative Answers : Explore how the API generates natural language responses when certified answers are insufficient, using relevant content chunks and an LLM for contextual, traceable answers.