Certified Answers

Certified Answers are business curated, verified and trusted, question and answer pairs such as FAQs or important procedures.

Certified Answers ensure trustworthy, consistent, and auditable responses by returning only vetted content authored and approved by the enterprise. When a Certified Answer is retrieved, it provides a complete, source-grounded response rather than a generated one.

How It Works

  1. Article Filtering
    • Only articles with the articleType set to 'FAQ' are used by the Certified Answers pipeline.
    • These articles are authored in a structured format:
      • The title represents the question (e.g., “What are loans?”).
      • The article content serves as the Certified Answer.
    • This ensures only trusted, purpose-authored FAQs are considered for Certified Answer retrieval.
  2. Semantic Search
    • A semantic search is performed over the Title and Related Questions metadata fields of the filtered FAQ articles.
  3. Relevance Scoring & Threshold Evaluation
    • All FAQ-type articles are scored based on semantic similarity to the user query.
    • If the top result’s similarity score meets or exceeds the configured certifiedAnswerThreshold , the corresponding article content is returned as the Certified Answer .
    • Any other FAQ articles that also meet the threshold are included in the searchResults .
  4. Fallback to Chunk Retrieval
    • If no FAQ articles meet the Certified Answer threshold, the API falls back to a hybrid search approach.
    • This ensures that even when no Certified Answer is found, relevant content chunks are still retrieved and returned to the user.

Why Certified Answers Matter

  • Unlike generative AI responses, which are probabilistic and can sometimes hallucinate , Certified Answers guarantee that the response is grounded in actual source content.
  • Ensure traceability and compliance for regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, and legal.

Example Request

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curl -X POST \
  'https://<API_DOMAIN>/core/aiservices/v4/PROD-1000/retrieve?q=mortgage%20requirements&%24lang=en-US' \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <ACCESS_TOKEN>"

Example Response

When a Certified Answer is given, the answer object will be returned in the response and the answerType will be 'certified'.

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{
  "answer": {
    "answerValue": "To apply for a mortgage, you need proof of income, credit history, and identification documents.",
    "references": [
      {
        "id": "PROD-11223",
        "name": "Mortgage Application Guide",
        "source": "eGain Article",
        "docType": "HTML",
        "topicBreadcrumb": [
          {
            "topicSummary": [
              {
                "id": "PROD-5268",
                "name": "Mortgages"
              }
            ]
          }
        ]
      }
    ],
    "answerType": "certified",
    "relevanceScore": 0.99
  },
  "searchResults": [
    {
      "id": "PROD-11223",
      "name": "Mortgage Application Guide",
      "source": "eGain Article",
      "snippet": "To apply for a mortgage, you need proof of income, credit history, and identification documents.",
      "snippetType": "articleContent",
      "relevanceScore": 0.99,
      "topicBreadcrumb": [
        {
          "topicSummary": [
            {
              "id": "PROD-5268",
              "name": "Mortgages"
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sessionId": "eb24df84-50d7-4321-b699-d9b03bbe5696"
}