Box Skills FAQ

Enabling Skills

Can I apply Skills to any folder I want?

As an admin, you can apply Skills to any folders your enterprise owns. You cannot apply Skills to content owned by another enterprise.

If I add an existing folder that contains sub-folders to an allowlist, will Box Skills process any files I subsequently place into those sub-folders?

Yes. But as with the top-level folder, Box Skills do not process any content that existed in those sub-folders before you configured them for Skills.

Is there an audit log that shows which files have been processed by Skills?

This is not yet available via the UI (that is, in the Admin Console reporting tab), though it’s on the roadmap. However, you can derive this information via the enterprise events API stream.

Do you have to add a different folder to an allowlist for each Skill type, or can you designate one folder for multiple Skills?

You can apply as many skills to a folder as you would like.

Can I view usage information for Box Skills?

Yes - Skills usage is available in the Box Admin Console using the Platform Analytics report. Aggregate Skills usage data is retained for one year.

Analyzing Content

With whom does Box partner to deliver Skills?

Initial partners for Skills include Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure Media Services, and IBM Watson. Customers can also build Custom Skills that apply the AI technology of their choosing.

Who's responsible for maintaining and improving these technologies?

Box's partners maintain and upgrade their own technologies. Box applies these technologies in Skills, but does not participate in supporting, maintaining, or enhancing them.

What file types does Skills support?

How do the audio and video skills “know” to tag a topic?

Box partners with multiple vendors to provide the Skills feature to Box customers, and each provider trains its own model differently. Factors we are aware of could include one or more of the following:

• frequency
• related words
• background objects
• background text

Does the face have to be human-like to be detected, or could it be a drawing or caricature?

Currently the Video Intelligence Skill does not detect illustrated or animated faces out of the box. However, you can build a Custom Skill you can train to recognize any such faces you specify.

Will the Skill learn over time if it tags something incorrectly?

Not out of the box. But you can build Custom Skills you can train on your own content and own the model and training set.

Copying/Moving/Sharing Analyzed Content

Can I export the data Box Skills displays, for example to download to a spreadsheet?

Not at this time. However, you can search through all your analyzed content, just as you would search for any content in Box, and get aggregated search results that way.

What happens if I copy or move a file that Box Skills has analyzed? What happens to the metadata?

That depends:

• If you move a file that has been analyzed, its metadata stays with it, even if you move it into a non-allowlisted folder.
• If you copy a file that has been analyzed into another folder, its metadata does NOT stay with it.
• If you copy a file that has been analyzed into a Skills-allowlisted folder, Skills reanalyzes it.

What happens if I share a file that has been analyzed? Can everyone with access to the file also view its metadata?

If you use a shared link to share a file with Skills metadata, any previewer of that file should be able to see skills card information. However, only someone with edit access to the file can edit the skill card information.

Skills

Can I apply Skills to files with non-English text or speakers?

Not yet. At the moment, Box Skills [Image, Audio, Video] are English-only. If a file with non-English speakers is applied, Skills will attempt to transcribe the data as if the spoken language were English. This is due to a limitation in our partner technologies - our partners are not yet able to auto-identify different languages. When our partners can support other languages, we will extend that support to our customers.

Why can’t I see the Skills configurations in the Admin Console, though Skills are processing my files?

If you were on the early private beta of Box Skills, you may be using Google Vision for Image Intelligence or Microsoft Azure Media Services for Audio Intelligence. These two Skill providers do not display in the Admin Console. Please contact your Box Beta Admin contact to re-configure these folders.

Related Links

Introducing Box Custom Skills

Enabling and Configuring Box Custom Skills

Using Box Custom Skills

Developer documentation:

• Introducing Box Skills
• Build a Box Skill
• Configure a Box Skill