Using an Amazon Q Business web experience
An Amazon Q Business web experience is an easy-to-use generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) assistant. You can use the Amazon Q Business web experience to ask questions and to accomplish your tasks. When you ask a question, the Amazon Q Business web experience analyzes the latest approved data collected from various data sources within your organization to generate a comprehensive response.
With an Amazon Q Business web experience, you can ask complex questions in plain language and get a detailed response. You can also use an Amazon Q Business web experience to perform tasks for you, such as draft an email message or create a Jira ticket.
Note
As of Oct 31, 2024, once you have created a new Amazon Q Business application environment, the default web experience will allow users to interact directly with the LLM to get answers from its general knowledge or uploaded file content (available to Pro users only), even if the Admin has not yet connected any enterprise data sources.
For existing application environments, the Allow direct access to LLM setting will remain as previously configured. For new application environments, the Allow direct access to LLM setting will be enabled by default, though Admins can still disable this if desired.
The Amazon Q Business web experience provides you with the following capabilities:
Web experience features
Important
An Amazon Q Business web experience establishes a secure WebSockets connection to supported Amazon Q Business endpoints over port 8443. For example,
wss://qbusiness.us-west-2.api.aws:8443/chat.
To ensure that your browser can successfully establish a WebSockets connection so that a web experience chat can work as intended, you must ensure that port 8443 is enabled and not blocked by network rules you have configured at the router, VPN, VPC, or firewall level.
Prompts
The welcome page optionally provides example prompts to help you understand the types of questions and tasks that you can ask the Amazon Q Business web experience. This feature is provided depending on how the web experience is configured. If provided, use the sample prompts to formulate your own questions and tasks.
Engage with contextual responses
The Amazon Q Business web experience analyzes your questions and returns responses that use information from various data sources within your organization. You can continue with the conversation in the context of the active session or start a new conversation.
Analyze content
Ask the Amazon Q Business web experience to summarize its response, generate text from the response, do comparative analysis, and also perform math and reasoning tasks.
Perform actions on your behalf
Use the Amazon Q Business web experience to perform actions on your behalf using plugins. For example, you can ask the web experience to schedule a meeting, create a ticket in Jira, or draft an email message. You only see an option to Use a plugin in your web experience if your admin has enabled it. You can only choose to perform plugin actions with Use a plugin mode enabled. For information on how to use a built-in plugin, see Using built-in plugins. For information on how to use a custom plugins, see Using custom plugins.
Note
You cannot use plugins and file uploads at the same time.
Review source citations
The Amazon Q Business web experience provides in-text source citations in the form of a numbered list. To view the source of the response, choose the number at the end of the sentence.The popover window shows the title of the source, the URL of the source, and a snippet from the source that was used to generate the response. Choose the URL to view the source document.
To view the entire list of sources, choose Sources at the end of the response. Use the source list to fact-check the response or for deeper analysis.
Upload files and chat
With the Amazon Q Business web experience, you can upload documents and ask Amazon Q questions, summarize, or analyze data based on their content. Amazon Q also supports a recent documents list, enabling you to find and reuse recently attached files in new conversations without re-uploading. You can upload new files from your computer, select from recent files, or drag and drop files directly into any conversation.
A maximum of five files can be uploaded in a single conversation. Documents uploaded through the chat interface are stored in your conversation history and deleted when the conversation is deleted or after 30 days of inactivity. Once files are attached to a conversation, they cannot be deleted individually; to remove attached files, you must delete the entire conversation.
Note
You cannot use plugins and file uploads at the same time.
Copy responses
You can copy and save the responses for later review and analysis. To copy a response, choose the copy icon at the end of the response.
Provide feedback
You can provide feedback at any time using the feedback button on the left hand sidebar. You can also provide direct feedback about the response you received from the Amazon Q web experience buy using the thumbs-up or thumbs-down button. Your feedback is used to help address technical issues in the web experience.
If you select the thumbs-down button, you can choose from the following feedback options:
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Response is not helpful (incorrect or not relevant to my query)
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Response is not based on company documents
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Response is not complete
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Response is not concise
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The sources are inaccurate or missing
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Other (explain below)
You can add additional context for any of the thumbs-down feedback options you choose in the Additional details (optional) text box.
Conversation management
Amazon Q Business stores each conversation for up to 30 days. Your conversations are listed in the left navigation pane. You can perform the following tasks to manage your conversations:
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View conversation history – Choose a conversation to view the conversation history for that session.
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Start new conversation – Choose + New conversation to start a new conversation.
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Delete conversation – Choose a conversation that you want to delete, choose Delete, and then choose Delete again.
Response sources
If your Admin has permitted, you can use choose to configure Amazon Q Business web experience responses from up to three sources; General knowledge, Company knowledge, or from the files you upload.
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General knowledge – If you choose this mode, Amazon Q Business will only to respond from Amazon Q's underlying LLM knowledge .
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Company knowledge – If you choose this, Amazon Q Business will only to respond from your enterprise data.
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Uploaded files – If you upload files, Amazon Q Business will only respond only from the data in the attached files. If the attached files do not contain an answer for the query, Amazon Q will automatically fall back to generating a response from the LLM knowledge.
For more information, see Using global controls in Amazon Q Business.
