Exploring Azure Question Answering Service (QnA Maker)

Azure Cognitive Service is a cloud-based service that provides a set of APIs for building intelligent applications. The service is composed of various APIs that are categorized into five main categories: Vision, Speech, Language, Web Search, and Decision. IIt allows developers to easily add intelligent features, such as emotion and video detection, facial, speech and vision recognition, and speech and language understanding, into their applications and build smart applications.

Azure Question Answering service is one of the capabilities of Azure Cognitive Service. It allows developers to add question-and-answer capabilities to their applications. It is a cloud-based service that uses machine learning to answer questions based on the best possible answer. It can be used to build applications that can answer questions based on a knowledge base or a set of documents.

In this hands-on lab, you will learn how to create a question-and-answer application using Azure Question Answering service. You will create a knowledge base using a set of documents and then use the knowledge base to answer questions.

Learning objectives

Upon completion of this intermediate-level lab, you will be able to:

• Understand the basics of Azure Question Answering service
• Create a knowledge base using external URLs
• Deploy the question-answering application bot
• Test the question-answering application bot

Intended audience

• Candidates for AI-102 (Designing and Implementing a Microsoft Azure AI Solution certification)
• Cloud Architects
• Data Engineers
• Machine Learning Engineers
• Software Engineers

Prerequisites

Familiarity with the following will be beneficial but is not required:

• Azure Cognitive Services

The following content can be used to fulfill the prerequisites:

• Designing Solutions Using Azure Cognitive Services

Updates

March 24, 2025 - Updated lab step to use an Azure Bot creation custom template