The Answer Bot API provides Help Center article suggestions for an enquiry. Answer Bot uses machine learning to return articles that might potentially help solve the issue. To learn more, see Answer Bot on the Zendesk website.

To use the Answer Bot API, your organization must be on the Guide Professional or Enterprise plan and have an Answer Bot monthly subscription. API usage is billed by request volume, with one resolution consumed for every 100 API requests. The API is also available on the trial.

Requesting an article suggestion from Answer Bot creates a suggestion. A suggestion is a collection of articles with content that might be related to the enquiry. The response also contains metadata that allows further access to Answer Bot API actions, such as resolving the request or providing feedback on the suggestion. See Get Articles Suggestions.

You can then use the suggested articles to provide a UI to your end users that allows them to self-solve their issue. If the user finds an answer to their question, you can use the API to mark the enquiry as resolved. The feedback helps Answer Bot improve its suggestions. You can also let the end user self-resolve an enquiry in Help Center. See Resolve Enquiry in Help Center.

You can provide other feedback with the following API endpoints:

• Record Article Viewed
• Record Article Rejection

Authentication works as described in the Security and Authentication in the Zendesk v2 API documentation.

Only the Get Article Suggestions requires authentication. Other endpoints require an interaction access token. The next section explains this type of token.

The response from the API includes an interaction_access_token that is required for further actions in the API. The token uses the JWT standard and contains encoded and signed internal information.

{
  "interaction_access_token": "GciOiJIUzI1NiJ9eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhb.0aWNsZXMiO...",
  ...
}

The decoded JWT token contains the following information:

{
  "id": 65731,
  "account_id": 1682103,
  "brand_id": 626052,
  "article_ids": [],
  "exp": 1525410034
}

You can read more about the JWT standard and decoding the token on the JWT IO website if you're debugging the integration.

Don't confuse the interaction_access_token with the auth_token in the same response. The auth_token is used in article URLs for resolving enquiries in Help Center. See Resolve Enquiry in Help Center.