Bots Platform v7.3

This section contains major and minor release information for the Kore.ai Bots Platform v7.3 released on July 4, 2020.

New Features

UI Forms

Kore.ai platform now allows virtual assistants to present a UI based form to gather information from the end-user to proceed further. Examples include providing delivery address while interacting with an eCommerce agent, details of an issue while reporting to ITSM agent, opportunity details while creating a CRM opportunity, capturing customer details to create a bank account, etc.

With access to a vast component library and the ability to define rules for validations and visibility, developers can configure a comprehensive UI Form experience. UI Forms can be used as part of the Digital Views or can also be included in the Dialog Tasks. When used from within the Dialog Tasks, the UI Form can co-exist with the conversational experience based on the channel of interaction. Learn More.

Data Tables 

Support to store and retrieve information when using the Kore.ai Virtual assistant has been further simplified with the Data Tables offering. Data Tables allow for storing, retrieving, updating, and deleting custom data records for any business needs. These can be used as data points collection for ‘feedback’ or ‘survey’ tasks, collecting user inputs that can be retrieved at a later point, etc.

Developers can also create custom Data Views by joining two or more tables. The table or view designers have the flexibility to assign bots and/or apps to the table/view. The data can be then be accessed from inside the assigned bots or directly using secured APIs. Business users can use the additional custom service options offered by the Service Nodes of Dialog Tasks for quick integration to read, write, update, and delete data. Learn more.

Bot Versioning

Kore.ai simplifies the Bot development lifecycle by auto-creating versions at the time of Publish. The developer can also create multiple custom versions of the Bot at various stages of the development process. Using these versions, the bot definition can be restored to a previous version. Learn more.

Enhancements

• Universal Bot – Universal Bot is enhanced to intelligently route user utterance only to the relevant linked bots using training data, contextual information, and preferences. It also includes a host of other enhancements like the ability to define fallback bots, improved publish flow, and much more. Learn More.
• Batch Testing:
  • The Batch Test suites now support defining the traits to be identified against an utterance.
  • The details of the thresholds and configurations used to run the test suite will be included in the test results summary.
  • Ability to run the test suite against the Published mode or the In-development mode of the Bot.
  • Ability to delete test suites and the test suite runs.

  Learn more.

• NLP:
  • Ability to enable and customize Dependency Parser for Fundamental Meaning Engine and Ranking & Resolver Engines (only for German and French languages). This setting has to be implicitly enabled, see here for details.
  • An enhanced experience for the user to switch to another intent while the bot is waiting for input via a link. Learn more.
  • Ability to enable or disable auto-correction of String entities irrespective of Extraction Behavior. Learn more.
• Knowledge Graph:
  • New option for lemmatization using Parts of Speech. Learn more.
  • Simplified CSV format for Knowledge Graph import/export with full support for all the Knowledge Graph features. The older CSV format is deprecated and will soon be discontinued. Learn more.
  • Prevention of training of the Knowledge Graphs with nodes containing a large number of questions (100 questions).
  • Search in Answer support extended for other languages, like German, Spanish, French, Portuguese(Brazilian), Italian, Indonesian, Dutch, Finnish, Polish, and Swedish. Learn more.
• Enterprise Features:
  • Ability to whitelist IPs to access the Bot Builder and Admin Console of an account. Learn more.
  • Active Directory Sync now supports the import of Organizational Units, the configuration of the Inclusion Rules, and Custom User Profile Fields. The support for the older version will continue but will soon be discontinued. Learn more.
• Language Support:
  • The ability to disable a supported language at the bot level has been included. Learn more.
  • Ability to customize messages related to language selection and disambiguation using a koreUtil.getCurrentOptions function. Learn more.
  • Enhancements to Korean language intent and entity detection.
• Channel Enablement:
  • New channels
    
    • Unblu Channel – Learn more.
    • WeChat Channel – Learn more.
  • Cisco Spark Channel has been updated in line with its rebranding as Cisco Webex Teams. Learn more.
• Security & Performance Updates
  • NodeJS Modules have been upgraded from 10.15.x to version 10.21.0.
  • Lodash has been upgraded to version 4.17.15.
  • Support extended for TLS 1.2 and disabled for TLS 1.1 & 1.0.
• Other Updates
  • Bot Metrics have been enhanced to allow filtering based on time in addition to date. Learn more.
  • The scope of apps has changed from ‘user-level’ to ‘bot level’. To ensure backward compatibility, if an app is being used in more than one bot, then the app will be duplicated with the same credentials for each of these bots. Learn more.

Deprecations

• The older CSV format for Knowledge Graph import/export is deprecated and will be discontinued in upcoming releases.
• With the enhancement to Universal Bots, the older version is deprecated and will soon be discontinued.
• With the enhancement to AD sync configuration, the support to the older version is deprecated and will soon be discontinued.
• The Dialog Import and Dialog Export options have been discontinued.

See here for details.