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:

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. Query Submitted
    • A request is sent to the Answers API, optionally including filters such as topicIds , tags , and userProfileIds to narrow the scope.
  2. Certified Answer Retrieval
    • The API first checks for Certified Answers that meet or exceed the configured certifiedAnswerThreshold .
    • The top result above the threshold is returned as the Certified Answer , while additional qualifying results are provided in searchResults .
  3. Fallback to Generative Answer
    • If no Certified Answer meets the certifiedAnswerThreshold , the query is used to retrieve content using a hybrid search retrieval approach.
    • The retrieved chunks along with the query are sent to the LLM. The LLM then generates a natural language response, grounded in retrieved content.
    • The generated answer is checked against a generativeAnsweTthreshold . If the confidence score falls below this threshold, a fallback message is returned instead of a potentially unreliable answer.
  4. Supporting Information
    • All responses include metadata such as references, supporting snippets, and relevance scores to maintain transparency and traceability.

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.