If you try to create a QnA Maker today, you will notice the following option. “Managed (preview)”. But what is this about?

What’s new or which new features are introduced:

1. Deep learnt ranker with enhanced relevance of results across all supported languages, based on Turing multilingual language model (T-ULRv2). Computation has been moved out of the user subscription, so there is no dependency on the customers for scaling and availability management. This allowed us to use SOTA deep learnt model for L2 ranker which enhances the L2 ranker horizontally across all the languages, so now we support all the 50+ languages with better and enhanced precision.
2. Precise phrase/short answer extraction from answer passages.
   

3. Simplified resource management by reducing the number of resources deployed.
   There will be only two resources:
   1. QnA Maker service for authoring and computation
   2. Azure Cognitive Search for storage and L1 ranking
4. E2E region support for Authoring + Prediction. Will be available in multiple regions to give customers’ the flexibility to keep their end-to-end service in one region.
5. Allows the user to do language setting specific to Knowledge Base. Now there’s no need to create another service if you want to create a Multilanguage Bot.

If you select managed, telemetry and compute will be included automatically with your QnA Maker resource. If you do not select managed, you will be prompted to create an App Insights and App Service resources for the required telemetry and compute that you will have to manage for your QnA Maker resource.

Pricing

Public preview of QnA Maker managed (Preview) will be free in all the regions (You only pay for the Azure Cognitive Search SKU). The standard pricing will be applicable when the service goes to GA by mid-2021.