Answer Bot

Note: Zendesk has renamed our bot capabilities. Answer Bot is now Zendesk bots. Article Recommendations are now autoreplies. For more information on this change, see this announcement.

The Answer Bot Article Recommendations API provides Help Center article recommendations 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 Recommendations API, your organization must have any Guide plan 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.

Run in Postman

If you use Postman, you can import the AnswerBot API endpoints as a collection into your Postman app, then try out different requests to learn how the API works. Click the following button to get started:

If you don't use Postman, you can sign up for a free account on the Postman website and download the app. For more information about using Postman with Zendesk APIs, see Exploring Zendesk APIs with Postman.

Using Answer Bot article recommendations

Requesting an article recommendation from Answer Bot creates a recommendation. A recommendation 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 Recommendations.

You can then use the recommended 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. 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

Authentication works as described in Security and authentication in the general API introduction.

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

Interaction Access Tokens

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.