Manage Coveo Search Agents

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Developer System Administrator
Important
Beta feature

Coveo Search Agent is currently available as a beta offering. Contact your Customer Success Manager for access to this feature. Your use of this feature is subject to the beta and pre-release terms of your agreement with Coveo, including any applicable beta or pre-release provisions therein. To the extent your agreement does not contain specific beta or pre-release terms, Section 8 (Beta Features) of the Coveo Customer Agreement shall apply. This feature is provided "as-is," without warranty or SLA coverage, and may be modified, suspended, or discontinued at any time. You should not use this feature to process sensitive or regulated data.

This article provides information on how to create a Coveo Search Agent to add conversational search to your Coveo-powered search interface.

Note

For complete implementation steps for the Coveo Search Agent, see Search Agent implementation overview.

Prerequisites

Before you can create a Coveo Search Agent, make sure you have the following:

Create a Search Agent

  1. On the Agents (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page of the Coveo Administration Console, click Add agent.

  2. On the General page, set the following:

    • Type: Select Search Agent.

    • Name: Enter a descriptive name for your Search Agent.

    • Description: Optionally, enter a description that identifies the purpose and usage of your Search Agent. This is for internal reference only.

  3. Click Next.

  4. On the Configuration page, set the following tool options:

    • For the Passage retrieval tool:

      • Select the CPR model you want your Search Agent to use for passage retrieval.

      • For Items to consider, set the maximum number of retrieved items you want the CPR model to consider when retrieving the most relevant passages.

        Passage Retrieval (CPR) uses two stages of content retrieval. First-stage content retrieval identifies the most relevant items in the index, and second-stage content retrieval identifies the most relevant segments of text (passages) from those items. The most relevant passages will then be used to generate answers.

        If you find that answers are generated using text from low-relevance items, you can use the Items to consider option to set a custom value for the maximum number of items considered during second-stage content retrieval. For example, if you set the maximum number of items to 20, the CPR model retrieves the most relevant passages only from the 20 most relevant items identified during first-stage content retrieval.

        Important

        The default setting of 40 provides good results in most use cases. However, you can specify a custom value if you have a good understanding of the relevance hierarchy of the results returned during first-stage content retrieval. If you set the value too low, there may not be enough relevant passages from which to generate an answer.

    • For the Answer generation tool, the Conversational AI option is enabled by default because it provides the best user experience. It should only be disabled for specific use cases requiring a non-conversational experience.

      When enabled, the Search Agent adds a conversational search experience to your search interface. This allows the Search Agent to handle follow-up questions and orchestrate multiple rounds of content retrieval and answer generation based on the ongoing conversation context.

      When disabled, the Search Agent generates only one answer based on the initial user query, and doesn’t allow users to ask follow-up questions. This is a non-conversational experience, where the Search Agent doesn’t maintain conversational context or perform multiple rounds of content retrieval and answer generation.

      Note

      The Conversational AI option is enabled by default because it provides the best user experience and should only be disabled for specific use cases requiring a non-conversational experience.

  5. Click Add Agent to save your Search Agent.

Required privileges

The following table indicates the privileges required for members to manage Coveo agents (see Manage privileges and Privilege reference).

Action Service - Domain Required access level

View agent configurations

Machine Learning - Agent configuration
Organization - Organization

View

Create and manage agents

Organization - Organization

View

Machine Learning - Agent configuration

Edit

Machine Learning - Models

View