Answer Server 26.3
Answer Server Help

# Ask

Sends a question to Answer Server and returns appropriate answers.

You specify the question in plain text in the Text parameter.

Answer Server parses the question, and attempts to retrieve associated answers from all your configured answer systems (fact banks, answer banks, passage extractors, and RAG). If you have multiple systems configured, Answer Server finds any available answers in all of them. You can optionally set the SystemNames parameter to specify the configured systems to attempt to retrieve answers from.

TIP: When the system forwards actions to another Knowledge Discovery component, such as the answer bank Agentstore or the passage extractor Content component, you can use the AllowedQueryParameters configuration parameter to specify parameters that Answer Server must pass through to the other components. You can then add these parameters to your `Ask` action to improve your query and results.

For passage extractor and RAG systems, you can also use the CandidateRetrievalDefaults configuration parameter to set parameters that Answer Server must add to the query to the Content component index to retrieve candidate documents.

## Example

    http://12.3.4.56:12000/action=Ask&Text=What is the largest city in Norway?

This action requests an answer to the question What is the largest city in Norway.

## Required Parameters

The following action parameters are required.

Parameter | Description
--- | ---
Text | The plain text question that you want to answer.

## Optional Parameters

This action accepts the following optional parameters.

Parameter | Description
--- | ---
Context | A question context ID to use to limit the scope of the question.
CustomizationData | A JSON object that specifies additional information to use in the query.
FirstResult | The number of the first result to return.
MaxResults | The maximum number of answers to return.
MinScore | The minimum score that an answer can have
Sort | The method to use to sort the answers.
SystemNames | The systems and system groups that you want to request answers from.
Timeout | The maximum length of time to process the action for.
TotalResults | Whether to return the total number of available answers.

This action accepts the following standard ACI action parameters.

Parameter | Description
--- | ---
ActionID | A string to use to identify an ACI action.
FileName | The file to write output to.
ForceTemplateRefresh | Forces the server to load the template from disk.
Output | Writes output to a file.
ResponseFormat | The format of the action output.
Template | The template to use for the action output.
TemplateParamCSVs | A list of variables to use for the specified template.

## Response

You can retrieve the full response XSD by sending the GetResources action with Type set to `XSD`.

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Version 26.3 | Last updated July 2026

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Product: Knowledge Discovery Answer Server 26.3

Topic Title: Ask