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Aide scores every customer message against your topics and tags it only when it is sure enough. This article explains the score, what to do with a message that fell just short, and which of your answers Aide learns from. Topics are under Topics in the sidebar; for creating and organising them, see Topics and how Aide tags conversations.

How Aide decides

When Aide tags a message, it reads each topic’s When to use this topic and the topic’s examples, and gives each topic a score. A topic is tagged when it scores at least the topic’s Threshold, 80% by default. The threshold is shown in the topic’s settings and can’t be changed yet. The chip on a customer message tells you what happened:

Review near misses

  1. Open Topics and select a topic. Near misses lists the messages from the last 30 days that came closest to it without reaching the threshold, newest first.
  2. Each row shows the score and the threshold, the message, and how long ago it arrived. Select the time to open the conversation.
  3. Choose It’s followed by the topic’s name if the message belongs to the topic, or Not followed by its name if it doesn’t. Either way the message leaves the list.
  4. Choose Load more near misses for older ones.
You can do the same from a conversation: open the dashed chip, read Aide’s reason, and choose one of the two buttons. A message that later gets a topic no longer shows a near miss.

What teaches Aide

  • It’s adds the message to the topic as a positive example. Not adds it as a negative example.
  • When Aide tags new messages, it reads only a topic’s positive examples that don’t need review, the five newest of them. Confirming a near miss puts that message among them.
  • A negative example records your decision and takes the message off the list. It isn’t read when Aide tags new messages. To stop a topic catching the wrong messages, say what it is not for in When to use this topic.
  • An example Aide has flagged for review isn’t read while it is flagged.

A topic with no examples

When a topic has no positive examples yet, its page says that Aide hasn’t seen an example of the topic. That is often why messages fall short of the threshold. Confirm a near miss, or add 3 to 5 real customer messages as examples.

When no topic fits

A message none of your topics fits gets a Suggested chip instead of a near miss. Open it to see the proposed name, description and group and how many messages it was seen in, then choose Add topic or Dismiss. Aide also adds suggestions that keep coming up (see Topics Aide adds on its own).

Confidence in procedures

A procedure can require a minimum score with a topic confidence condition, from 80% to 97.5% (see Choose when a procedure runs).