Overview of the Migration from QnA Maker to Custom QnA Maker

Introduction

For many years, we have been working with QnA Maker, which is the core knowledge source of the Microsoft Bot Framework for answering FAQs. The time for its retirement has been announced, and with the latest trends, AI capabilities are also in place. Therefore, we need to consider better performance and the quality of the content we deliver to end users, who can be referred to as customers or internal users, etc.

Announcement

As you are aware, the retirement of QnA Maker was announced in March 2022, and the complete shutdown is planned for March 2025. Before that, any project running on QnA Maker should migrate to Custom QnA Maker. Remember, Microsoft has already provided AI capabilities in Custom QnA Maker, and it is far better than QnA Maker because of these AI capabilities.

QnA Maker Tool Migration

The following option will display on the home page of QnA Maker once you log in.

Click on the "Start Migration" button, and the below popup with relevant information will appear.

• Select tenant: Select your tenant that has the QnA Maker resource available.
• QnA Maker resource: Select your QnA Maker resource.
• Language resource: This service is required for the migration, and we need to create a language service for Custom QnA migration.
• Knowledge bases: The knowledge bases mean that under the language service, we need to create custom question-answering resources. Under that, we can create a knowledge base similar to the existing QnA Maker. This knowledge base can be created and assigned in this section, ensuring that the existing knowledge data will securely migrate to this Custom QnA knowledge base.

Custom QnA Maker

Here is the new look of Custom QnA Maker. The UI is a bit smaller than QnA Maker, but you have plenty of options to edit.

There is an interesting tab called "Review suggestions" that will give you a couple of suggestions for your FAQs. You can utilize these to expose quality content to the user.

Language Service in Language Studio

The name clearly states that it’s a language service. Yes, a couple of language services together formed this new Azure service, and everything can be created under the same portal, which will be helpful for all the maintenance work.

Here are the key points i want to highlight

• As of now, tool-to-tool migration is available in the QnA Maker portal, and you can make use of it. Don’t try KB download and upload because, in certain cases, this fails. Always go with tool migration.
• Even rich editor options can be selected through the toggle button, and synonyms are added in a separate category. Initially, we could add synonyms through the API post method or through Excel. Now, we can visually cross-check all these sections, which will be helpful for content owners.
• There is an interesting tab called "Review Suggestions" that will give you a couple of suggestions for your FAQs. You can decide which ones to accept or reject based on your knowledge, ensuring the outcome is always quality content for the user.
• The more migration information you can visit - Microsoft QnA to Custom QnA Maker Migration

Summary

This article provides a quick overview of the QnA Maker to Custom QnA Maker migration. We need to start this process immediately to avoid impacting our customer projects. Last-minute migrations can be hectic, so it’s better to try it out now and notify the Microsoft team of any challenges for better assistance.