Semantic Search
In order to use semantic search, you need to create your own model first. See the documentation for more details.
Trying to answer questions about a large corpus of domain knowledge? You might want to read this guide.
Semantic Search
What is Semantic Search?
Semantic search is about searching content using natural language, exactly the way Google does. When using semantic search, you don't need to search for exact keywords (also known as keyword search) as the AI is able to understand your request and interpret it.
Let's say that you are an HP printers reseller and that you have have thousands of documents like technical descriptions about printers, prices, terms of service... Maybe you want to make it easy to search these documents on your e-shopping website? See these 3 short documents for example:
HP® LaserJets have unmatched printing speed, performance and reliability that you can trust. Enjoy Low Prices and Free Shipping when you buy now online.
Every HP LaserJet comes with a one-year HP commercial warranty (or HP Limited Warranty).
HP LaserJet ; Lowest cost per page on mono laser printing. · $319.99 ; Wireless options available. · $109.00 ; Essential management features. · $209.00.
Now, imagine that one of your customers asks the following question on your e-shopping website:
How long is the warranty on the HP Color LaserJet Pro?
The semantic search AI model will return the following in the blink of an eye:
Every HP LaserJet comes with a one-year HP commercial warranty (or HP Limited Warranty).
Maybe your customer did not ask a properly formed question? No problem, a query like this would work too:
period warranty HP Color LaserJet Pro
So as you can see, semantic search is much more advanced than the traditional keyword search, as you can ask questions in natural language like you would do with a human. Additionally, semantic search AI is very good at performing disambiguation (understanding the meaning of a word thanks to its context).
Semantic search is a very good solution when it comes to searching and performing question answering on your own data, because it is both blazing fast and accurate.
Why Use Semantic Search?
Semantic search has made dramatic progress these last few years, both in terms of speed and accuracy. Here are some use case examples:
Website Search
It is now very common to see search bars on online websites, like e-shopping websites, technical documentation, etc. Thanks to semantic search, you can greatly improve this search feature in order to make it more relevant and accurate.
Customer Support
Support chatbots are more and more advanced. You can now ask a support AI advanced questions about your contract, product features, refund policies, etc.
Internal Knowledge Base
Employees sometimes have a hard time retrieving the right information, which makes their day-to-day job harder and slows down their productivity. A good solution is to propose an internal knowledge base that is accessible with semantic search.
Search Legal And Financial Documents
Parsing complex legal and financial documents can be a challenge. A solution here is to add these documents to the AI engine, and easily apply semantic search in order to retrieve results.
Language
AI models don't always work well with non-English languages.
We do our best to add non-English models when it's possible. See for example Fine-tuned LLaMA 3.1 405B, LLaMA 3 70B, Dolphin, ChatDolphin, XLM Roberta Large XNLI, Paraphrase Multilingual Mpnet Base V2, or spaCy. Unfortunately not all the models are good at handling non-English languages.
In order to solve this challenge, we developed a multilingual module that automatically translates your input into English, performs the actual NLP operation, and then translates the result back to your original language. It makes your requests a bit slower but often returns very good results.
Even for models that natively understand non-English languages, they actually sometimes work even better with the multilingual addon.
Simply select your language in the list, and from now on you can write the input text in your own language!
This multilingual add-on is a free feature.