#CV10Years – A Day in the Life of a Junior Knowledgebase Engineer

By Peter Studd, Junior Knowledgebase Engineer

If you’re thinking ‘what exactly is a Knowledgebase Engineer’, don’t worry. You aren’t the first one to ask me that question. In a nutshell, I program Creative Virtual’s virtual assistant implementations to understand natural language queries. Much of my work is done within V-Portal™, our platform designed specifically for the creation, updating, testing and deploying of virtual assistants. On a typical working day you will find me sitting in front of my computer focused on making updates to the natural language conditions of one of our projects.

I plan my day based on tasks my colleagues assign to me within V-Portal and from special requests sent through email. For each update on my list I must open the correct recognition within the knowledgebase, then inspect, test, alter and create the corresponding natural language conditions. Some of you may think this sounds like a boring, tedious job, but in reality creating new condition strings or updating old ones is a great job. It involves a great deal of creativity and problem solving – it often feels like doing word puzzles. It’s like no job I have ever done before and offers great job satisfaction.

The work I do helps to make our virtual assistants more effective at answering users’ questions – be that by adding new content or by refining existing questions and answers. For example, it’s possible for similar questions to be confused with each other. By producing and reviewing transcripts and reports that show user inputs, I can check if the virtual assistant is providing the best answer available in the knowledgebase and fine tune existing conditions to improve the system. When I’m not working on big updates, I will take on smaller tasks such as amending content categories (for organising the knowledgebases and reports), updating answer texts and any links they contain, and running reports.

Having involvement with several different customer projects means I am always kept busy, and we all work together to prioritise workloads and meet our clients’ requests within the agreed deadlines. Creative Virtual has a really great team, and since starting last August I have received lots of training and support from my colleagues in person in the Bristol office, as well as from those based in London and colleagues overseas.

Working as a Knowledgebase Engineer isn’t my first job, but it is by far the one I enjoy the most. I love the challenge of working with the natural language conditioning of the virtual assistants. It’s exciting to be a part of Creative Virtual’s 10th Anniversary celebrations and to know that even the smallest of my daily tasks helps our customers reach their goals of providing their customers with a positive service experience.