Bot Builder v6.3.0
The feature enhancements in this release make Kore.ai Bots Platform more open and extensible by providing greater access to platform APIs while streamlining elements of the bot development lifecycle. This release also includes major additions to dialog tasks, language support, bot training, and IVR.
Role-based Access to Bots with Custom Entitlements
Bot owners and administrators can now assign granular bot-level entitlements to developers. You can create custom roles within the Bot Admin Console using the permissions and then invite users to bots by associating them to suitable roles.
Granular Control over Bot and Task Publishing Process
Developers now have better control over publishing bot updates to end users. All changes to bot definition, including NLP Settings, Bot Settings, Channels, and Extensions will be versioned within the platform and the developers will need to select the required components to be published. This granular control on publish process, along with role-based access to bot definition, will allow enterprises to fully implement Maker-Checker process for bot development.
Public access to Platform APIs – Additional APIs exposed
In addition to the existing public APIs, developers can now access a host of additional secured public APIs to perform various bot management activities like training, bot migration (import and export), and publishing.
Account management activities like managing Bot Builder access, managing admin and bot roles can also be performed via secured public APIs. Using these APIs, the bot building process can be aligned with the enterprise release management process.
Additional Language Support
In addition to the existing platform support for nine languages, you can now create and publish bots in Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Dutch and Bahasa.
Knowledge Extraction Service (Beta)
Kore.ai platform’s Knowledge Extraction Service extracts FAQs from PDF documents, CSV files or URLs. Developers will have an option to review the extracted content (FAQs) and add them to the Knowledge Graph.
Custom Bot Behavior based on Events
The Bots Platform now allows you to invoke intents or present custom responses based on a defined list of platform or channel-specific events. For example, when a user clicks the ‘Get Started’ button to initiate a chat with FB Messenger bot, it triggers the Facebook Welcome event. This can be used to capture user profile or update a backend system.
Note: The Bot Builder platform no longer supports Welcome Message. If you have defined a Welcome Message in previous versions of the platform, the upgraded version automatically creates a corresponding Welcome event and On Connect event to ensure backward compatibility.
Custom Authentication Support
Developers can implement custom authentication for their bot by providing URL from the service node to an external application that manages the authentication. The platform provides the necessary functionality to handle successful and failed authentication scenarios and manage the corresponding task flows.
Ability to Export Information from Bot Analyze
Developers can export the data present in Bot Analyze page to a CSV file. The download includes the information present on the selected tab as well as the detailed analysis based on the selected filters.
Introducing Status Dock to Track Bot Updates
Bot Builder now has a new UI component that keeps a track of all export and training jobs. Once a job is completed, the dock will show the status and also provides an option to download files if applicable.
Control over Smart Bot – Child Bot Upgrades
With this upgrade, developers of child bot will have the ability to review the upgrades received in the inherited bots before publishing them. Developers may continue to use the existing feature of directly publishing the upgrades without the need for developer and Admin approvals.
Invoking Dialog Tasks from FAQ Responses
The Knowledge Graph now allows developers to link a Dialog task as a response to an FAQ. It helps bot developers to leverage the capabilities of the Knowledge Graph and Dialog tasks to handle FAQs that involve complex conversations.
Enhancements to Batch Testing
The Batch Testing feature is now enhanced to support matching of sub-intents within a dialog and the entities present in user utterances.
IVR Enhancements
- Maximum No Inputs / No Match scenario – Instead of terminating the call, developers now have the option to configure the behavior. They can choose to either Initiate Call termination or Initiate a dialog task or jump to a specific node in the current task. This option is applicable only for the Entity Node.
- Creating Instance-Specific VXML Properties – Ability to directly create VXML properties at the node, standard response, and welcome message levels. These properties would be component specific and aren’t accessible from the global VXML properties.
NLP Thresholds – Ability to modify ML engine parameters
The ML parameters used to identify user intent against the utterance can now be controlled via the NLP thresholds, thus allowing developers to define the NLP-engine capability based on their use cases.
Minor Updates
- You can now add language-specific synonyms for ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ within the Confirmation node to suit the dialog’s context.
- Bot Builder now proactively prompts developers to initiate training whenever there is a change in bot synonyms when bot synonyms are enabled to be included in the machine learning model for intent identification.
- In addition to the full and partial matches, the LoV synonyms now also support exact match. Exact match looks for 100% match between the user utterance and the synonym.
- The List template for Web and Mobile SDK no longer requires more than three list entries to show the global buttons, for example, Show More and Show Previous at the end of the list options. Developers now have an option to turn off the minimum requirement.
- Prioritize Entity vs. Intent in a User Utterance – When user’s input for an entity consists of a valid value for the entity and another intent, platform used to pick entity value and proceed. Now, the developers can control the experience by choosing between “Intent over Entity” or “Entity over Intent” options. This can be done either at the Entity node or at the Confirmation node.
- Hold & Resume enhancements – A new option “Switch to new task without any notification to user and discard current task” has been added to the list at bot, task, linked task, and node levels.
- Ability to define and control the webhook timeout duration up to 10 mins per instance. Until now the webhook would time out in 2 mins.
- Ability to control and define service node (service call) timeout up to 20 seconds per instance.
- Line Channel update – Ability to set up Line channel with auto-refresh token
- Security-related changes
- 2 Way SSL Support for all service calls
- Improved JSON schema validation for APIs
Bot Builder v6.3.1
This section contains the release information for Bot Builder v6.3.1, a minor release on Feb 25, 2019.
New Channels
Two new channels have been added for publishing the Bot:
- Google Hangout Chat, and
- Mattermost.
Chat Export Feature
Chat Export functionality from the Analyze menu has been enhanced to export a chat.
Bug Fixes related to IE browser, application and data security, and more.