A system and method for using, training, building, and managing a question and answer engine to automatically generate responses to an end-user is disclosed. Specifically, the method and system make use of a topic builder that uses cluster predictions to generate and identify a list of topics and subtopics. A question and answer database may then be sorted by topic and subtopic using a similarity scorer. New user utterances may be analyzed to identify questions, with a cluster predictor identifying the corresponding topic and subtopics for each question, and a similarity scorer may identify the closest known question for the user's question to a recommender as an answer. Analytics of new user utterances are tracked to update the historical utterance database and question and answer database, thus allowing continuous improvement of the engine.