QnA Maker API | Microsoft Azure

Quickly create a conversational layer over your data

QnA Maker is a cloud-based API service that lets you create a conversational question-and-answer layer over your existing data. Use it to build a knowledge base by extracting questions and answers from your semi-structured content, including FAQs, manuals and documents. Answer users’ questions with the best answers from the QnAs in your knowledge base – automatically. Your knowledge base gets smarter too, as it continually learns from user behaviour.

Automatically extract question-answer pairs from semi-structured content, including FAQs, product manuals, guidelines, support documents and policies.

Improve your knowledge base with suggestions for alternative questions. Add or reject them based on their relevance.

Easily create, edit and train complex multiturn conversations in the QnA Maker portal or using REST APIs.

Create and publish a bot in Teams, Skype or elsewhere; no code experience required. Simply upload a semi-structured document or URL.

Add personality to your bot using chit-chat

Make your bot more conversational by adding a pre-populated chit-chat dataset. Choose a persona that’s professional, witty, friendly, caring or enthusiastic.

Learn about chit-chat

Support rich data and dynamically manage content

Your QnA Maker knowledge base supports Markdown for dynamic content management. To utilise Markdown’s full capability, simply modify your content directly in the table, or upload a knowledge base that includes the rich content.

Learn about rich content

Scale to meet your business and compliance needs

QnA Maker service is a hosted model, so you can choose product tiers according to your size and throughput needs and feel secure knowing that all components are within your Azure compliance boundary.

Learn about QnA Maker architecture

Chat in more than 50 languages

When you create a knowledge base, QnA Maker auto-detects the primary language and sets the analyser accordingly. The service supports more than 50 languages.

Learn about supported languages

Store and deploy securely in Azure

Microsoft invests over USD 1 billion annually on cybersecurity research and development.
We employ more than 3,500 security experts completely dedicated to your data security and privacy.
Azure has more compliance certifications than any other cloud service provider. View the comprehensive list.

ISO/IEC

CSA/CCM

ITAR

CJIS

HIPAA

IRS

Learn more about security on Azure

Create a knowledge base

QnA Maker lets you easily add your existing data sources when creating a knowledge base. Create a new QnA Maker knowledge base from FAQ pages, products manuals or other semi-structured documents.

Include a chit-chat personality

Make your knowledge base more conversational and engaging. Add a chit-chat personality. Choose one of several personas to bring your organisation’s voice to life.

Test and publish a knowledge base

Test your knowledge base through an enhanced chat interface; then iterate to improve the accuracy of your responses. After thorough testing, publish your knowledge base to make it available as a question-answering endpoint to a client application.

Create a bot

After publishing the knowledge base, create your QnA Maker bot and get started.

Create a feedback loop

Use active learning to improve the quality of your knowledge base. Generate alternative questions based on user submissions. Review those suggestions, and add or reject them based on their relevance.

Get pricing details

See pricing for QnA Maker management services. Remember: When you create a QnA Maker resource, you host the data and runtime in your own Azure subscription. These are enabled by Azure App Service and Azure Cognitive Search. View pricing for Azure App Service and Azure Cognitive Search.

See QnA Maker pricing

Everything you need to get started

Get instant access and a $200 credit by signing up for a free Azure account.

Learn how to build a bot with 5-minute quickstart tutorials and documentation.

Enhance QnA Maker with additional features and products, such as security and backup services.

Documentation and API references

"QnA Maker enabled Accenture to build corpus at speed to quickly launch an HR chatbot for 100,000-plus people. We were able to leverage QnA Maker and LUIS to build our conversation hierarchy, getting us the best of both."
Sangita Agarwal, Managing Director – Human Resources Technology Platforms, Accenture

"Using Bot Service and Cognitive Services, such as Language Understanding and the Azure QnA Maker API, made it easy for our developers to put an advanced, conversational experience in the hands of our customers very fast."
Antonio Guzman Sacristan, Head of Innovation, Telefonica Aura

"By using Microsoft Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services, such as Language Understanding and QnA Maker, we've been able to continue our own Progressive journey of digital innovation, and do it in an agile, fast, and cost-effective way."
Matt White, Marketing Manager – Personal Lines Acquisition Experience, Progressive Insurance

Frequently asked questions about QnA Maker

All deletions within QnA Maker are permanent, including question-and-answer pairs, files, URLs, custom questions and answers, knowledge bases and Azure resources. Make sure that you export your knowledge base from the Settings page before deleting any part of your knowledge base. Learn more
Follow the instructions in the documentation to create your bot with Azure Bot Service.
QnA Maker supports multiple languages. If you have content from multiple languages, make sure that you create a separate service for each language.

Build, train and publish your bot

Getting started

QnA Maker