Deep dive into Smart Answers in Confluence Search - Now in Open Beta!

[#1]

Hi Community!

I’m Izzy, one of the product managers working on AI at Atlassian. I’m thrilled to announce that our new ‘Smart Answers in Confluence Search’ feature is now available in open beta!

Stop searching, start asking! This feature helps you easily find the information you need. It understands the types of questions you would ask a teammate, and answers them instantly.

How do I get started? Activate Atlassian Intelligence

Our AI-powered search is available in Confluence. Once your organisation admin activates Atlassian Intelligence, you and your teams can access AI search through the Confluence search bar.

Here’s the steps for org admins to activate Atlassian Intelligence:

1. Go to admin.atlassian.com. Select your organisation if you have more than one.

2. Select Settings > Atlassian Intelligence. You’ll see a table with any products that already have Atlassian Intelligence activated. This will be empty if your organisation hasn’t activated it for any products yet.

3. Select Select products. You’ll see a list of the products in your organisation that you can activate Atlassian Intelligence for. Only products that have Atlassian Intelligence features available are shown here.

4. Choose the products to activate Atlassian Intelligence for. You can select as many as you want.
   ℹ️ If you’ve already activated Atlassian Intelligence previously for Confluence, you won’t need to repeat these steps for those products. Learn more about the AI features now available.

5. Select Next, review your products, and accept the Atlassian Intelligence terms and conditions. Select Save to confirm.

Smart Answers in Confluence Search can be found in both Confluence quick search and Confluence advanced search.

Confluence quick search:

From Confluence, click into the quick search bar in the top right of your screen, type in your question and click ‘Ask AI’ for your answer.

Confluence advanced search:

From quick search, type your question and either hit enter or ‘advanced search’ - an answer will automatically show when our AI detects that you have asked it a question.

Or simply ask a question in the advanced search bar directly!

If you expected a smart answer to your question, and we didn’t show you one, you can still click the ‘Ask AI’ button in the Confluence advanced search bar to generate an answer manually.

How can I use smart answers in search?

AI-powered search allows you to search just like you would ask a question to a teammate. Let Confluence do the heavy lifting to understand your search and find the information you’re after.

Examples:

• “What is project sunrise?”

• “How do I take PTO?”

• “Who is Jane Doe?”

• ”When is the new mobile feature being released?”

Smart answers will use the information documented in your Confluence site, including from pages that are restricted to others but visible to you, in order to answer your question. You can ask questions about anything that’s documented in your Confluence site.

Atlassian Intelligence is built for trust

Atlassian takes your privacy seriously, and we work together to handle your data responsibly. Our Privacy Principles and Privacy Policy are applied to Atlassian Intelligence. Additionally, in building, deploying and using Atlassian Intelligence, Atlassian is guided by its Responsible Technology Principles.

As users of our own products, we’re truly building the products and privacy protections we want to work within. Still have questions? Learn even more by visiting our trust center.

Tell us what you think!

We’d love to hear from you! We value your input as we continue developing Atlassian Intelligence, shaping its direction, and improving the final experience during beta. There are a few ways to leave feedback:

1. Share your feedback in the comments below

2. Chat with me directly about the Smart Answers in Search feature by booking some time on my calendar: https://calendly.com/ikohout/60min

We hope you enjoy the feature. Welcome to a better way to find information in Confluence!

[Andy Gladstone]

Just enabled on my instance. So far the answers coming in are 100% correct. Interested to see whether this will speed up our knowledge sharing now that Confluence can be searched based on questions instead of just keywords. 

[Andy Gladstone]

It would be nice if the AI search option was still available in the search results after mistakenly hitting enter in the Advanced Search. I am so used to entering text in that filed and hitting enter that when I get to the search results screen I need to do a new search rather than just updating the current search.

[Izzy Kohout]

Hey @Andy Gladstone , thank you for the feedback and so glad to hear you're having a good experience with smart answers thus far. 

Smart answers should show on advanced search when you hit enter if the AI detects that you have asked it a question. If you wanted an answer on AS but you didn't get one, there is an 'Ask AI' button in the advanced search bar on the right that you can hit to generate an answer manually. Can you confirm that you're seeing this button in the AS bar?

[Andy Gladstone]

The button is NOT appearing in my search bar after I hit enter and it shows the search results.

[Izzy Kohout]

Thank you for bringing this to my attention @Andy Gladstone looks like we ran into an unexpected bug as we released that has caused this behaviour. The team is working on a fix for this now.
We hope to have it working as expected by tomorrow, I will update you as needed. 

[Cp Richardson]

@Izzy Kohout this seems like a super rad feature. Looking forward to using it. I want to verify a security question before switching it on:

• We have a lot of sensitive information in our confluence space (code snippets, roadmaps, etc.). Is our training data (or the impact on the model) shared with other customers, or do they guarantee that our data remains our own and only impacts our model? For instance, we will occasionally see other customer's internal information in Github's copilot results.

Ideally, the model is segmented and becomes an expert on our data alone without sharing that expertise elsewhere. We know it may impact our smart answers performance, but we'd rather not run the risk of our data being externally exposed.

[Izzy Kohout]

Hello @Andy Gladstone this issue should be fixed now. Can you confirm that you can see the 'Ask AI' button in the Confluence advanced search bar? 

@Cp Richardson , thank you for the question.

Yes, you are correct- I can confirm that your org's data & insights derived from your data are not shared with any other tenants or used to train our model for this feature.

For more information, please see our privacy policy: https://www.atlassian.com/legal/privacy-policy#what-this-policy-covers

[Andy Gladstone]

@Izzy Kohout it is now fixed and working. Thank you.

[Cp Richardson]

@Izzy Kohout thank you for the information. Quick follow-up, I reviewed the privacy policy and noticed nothing explicitly reaffirming your response above. Can you point me to where that's located in the privacy policy? Just want to make sure we have a ducks in a row before turning smart answers on.

[Izzy Kohout]

Hey @Cp Richardson thank you for the follow up - I believe our Trust Center FAQs should answer your question directly!

[Arthur Mack]

Smart answers is working great for us. Just over the weekend I saw we now have a summary button we can use for a page that works very well. Also highlighting words in read mode allows us to select DEFINE and we get a definition of the word or phrase. However, this is no longer working!!! It has disappeared. I uninstalled some other 3rd party apps we were using so I am wondering if that is the issue?

[Izzy Kohout]

Hello @Arthur Mack , thank you for the comment! Can I confirm whether smart answers in search is not showing, or the 'define' functionality is not showing? 

[Chiel Kooiker]

Hi,

Is this Smart Answers-functionality the same search functionality as included in https://www.atlassian.com/software/artificial-intelligence? 

Because on https://www.atlassian.com/software/artificial-intelligence, it's looks a little bit different. 

[Arthur Mack]

Good news DEFINE is back!!!!!

[Izzy Kohout]

Hi @Chiel Kooiker , thank you for your question!

Yes, this is the same functionality. The GIF in the https://www.atlassian.com/software/artificial-intelligence link is just a mock for illustrative purposes. 

[Sean Braganza]

Thanks @Izzy Kohout 

Will Smart Search be made available for Anonymous Users of a Confluence Instance in the future as well? 

[John Robbins]

Starting today, when I start a paragraph in confluence it prompts me to "Type /ai to tell Atlassian Intelligence to write or edit anything".  I DO NOT have AI turned on/activated in confluence.

How do I stop confluence from prompting?  I am not interested in using AI and I find this distracting and annoying.

[Ethan Yew]

Hey @John Robbins , thanks for flagging this bug with us. This message should only be shown to customers who have enabled Atlassian Intelligence for their product(s). Work is currently in progress to hide this message for you and others who shouldn't be seeing the message. The fix should be rolling out soon, thank you for your patience here.

[Izzy Kohout]

Hi @Sean Braganza , thank you for the question! Right now, we don't have any plans to make this feature available for anonymous users. I will let you know if this changes!

[Cp Richardson]

Quick question now that we have enabled this features. When we use the "Ask AI" function, we have to highlight the text in the light theme to see the text. I can see it in dark mode, but I wanted to flag this. Is this something on our end?

[Izzy Kohout]

Thank you for the feedback @Cp Richardson

There's a possibility this may be an issue with your Confluence theme settings. Do you know if your org admin has set any custom colours for the light theme?

More information on this here:

https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/customize-a-sites-color-schemes/

[Cp Richardson]

That's probably what it is since we do have custom colors on our site. I'll take a look at it.