What’s New

This section contains release information for the Kore.ai Bots Platform v9.0 released on Aug 14th, 2021.

See Major Previous Releases

Highlights

Conversation Driven Dialog Builder – an improved dialog task editor which allows you to design and build a dialog task using conversational elements. The conversational scene blueprints created by Business Users can automatically be converted into executable Dialog Task flows, with two-way synchronization between Storyboard Scenes and Dialog Tasks.
Store for sample templates and accelerators to jump-start the bot development process.
Process Application Builder for building multi-step and multi-user workflows for automating internal and external processes, like expense reimbursement, leave approval, etc. Easy integration with Conversational Apps for initiating and approving flows.
Refreshed user interface that helps you easily locate the right features during your development journey. Unified experience for training intents and entities.

Design and Develop

Conversation Driven Dialog Building – Single interface to design and develop virtual assistants:
- Using the conversation-driven Dialog Builder, the product owners, business analysts, linguistic experts, content editors, and engineers can all collaborate on the same definition for achieving the common goal. The conversation flow can be designed using bot and user messages, and the Platform automatically transforms the conversation flow into a Dialog Task. The integrated view for evaluation of the conversation flow and the dialog flow and the two-way sync between both the views are key ingredients to this collaboration. This is a beta release for this feature and a few more updates are expected in the upcoming releases. Know more.
Process Application Builder
- Design flows to automate business processes using the no-code/low-code Process Flow Builder. It comes with a wide range of predefined templates, support for multiple trigger points – Forms, Conversational Assistants, API, Email. The in-built self-service Portal can be used by your users to quickly initiate new tasks and approve the pending tasks. One can also review teams and workflow performance using built-in analytics. Know more.
Store
- Introducing the Store to explore various pre-built templates and accelerators to jump-start the designing of Virtual Assistants and Process Apps. Explore the full capabilities of a template and install it to customize as needed. These prebuilt templates include a reference implementation for popular use cases like order updates, incident/ticket management, account management. Know more.
Enhanced User Interface: In a bid to improve the user experience and ease the development process, the Kore.ai Virtual Platform user interface has been given a complete makeover. This includes:
- The refreshed user interface for the Kore.ai Platform – The Virtual Assistant designing features are packaged into Build, Deploy, Analyze and Manage sections, aligning them closely with the development lifecycle. All the features required to build tasks, train, and test are included under the Build menu. Channel enablement, integrations, publish flow, and bot definition management are under the Deploy menu. Know more.
- Unified NLP Training – A simplified experience for training the Machine Learning and Fundamental Meaning Engines in one place. Intents can be trained using a unified interface, making it easier to switch between utterances, patterns, and rules. Know more.
Version Comparison
- Bot Version feature now allows you to compare two versions of a bot across various sections of the bot definition. Administrators can use this tool to compare the changes during deployment and designers can use it to analyze changes or debug errors. Know more.
Digital Views are now supported for Universal Bots. Create panels in Universal Bot and add widgets from one or more linked bots. Know more.
Digital Forms Enhancements:
- Support for Secure Forms and Password Fields: Enable Secure Form Data to redact form data during execution and from logs.
- The Date component allows you to choose your preferred date format
- The Phone Number component is enhanced to specify Default Country Code.
- The Checkbox component has an option to define the order in which the values are presented to the end-user and Checkbox Layout can be used to display the checkbox values in a grid view.
  Know more.
API Enhancements
- Enhancements to Session History API to include the Containment Type, count of the Total Messages exchanged, and Tasks completed. Know more.
- New API has been introduced to export the individual billing sessions of a given bot. Know more.
Channel Enhancements
- IVR/Voice Channels:
  - Enhanced voice channel experience with new controls for choosing how to process the input from the ASR Engines. Know more.
  - Renaming of IVR channel VXML Properties to Call Control properties and extending their support to AudioCodes Channel. Know more.
  - Ability to define Voice Call Properties for fulfilling Sub-intents added to Group Nodes. Know more.
  - Payload enhancements to the async Webhook channel to include endReason, completedTaskId, and completedTaskName. Know more.

NLU & NLP Features

Language Updates – The NLP Engine now supports five new languages (Catalan, Tamil, Hindi, Marathi, and Telugu) with end-to-end support for intent, traits, and entity identification. Know more.
ML Network Types: Introducing Kore Advanced Embedding Network (KAEN) a model which can understand the meaning of the sentence and at the same time give importance to the domain-specific terminology. Know more.
Advanced NLP Configurations allow users to fine-tune the NLP engines using advanced controls. The following enhancements have been included in this release:
- Custom configuration for auto spell correction support for ML predictions. Know more.
- Additional configurations for the evaluation of the Fundamental Machine Engine Patterns. Know more.
- Configure Softmax Temperature to define how confidently the ML Engine should identify the winning intent from the ML Model. Know more.
- Configure Neurons in Hidden Layer to determine the intensity/rigor to be adopted while performing intent identification by the ML Model. Know more.
Entity Rules are used for additional processing hints and validation of user input from the Entity Rules section under Instance Properties of the corresponding entity.
Following are the enhancements to the rules in this release:
- Ability to accept only ‘month and year’ as input for Date entity (returnOnlyMonthYear)
- Ability to set preferred format for Date entity to avoid ambiguity scenarios (preferredDateFormat)Know more.
Knowledge Graph
- Taxonomy based Knowledge Graph – Explore the new approach to build a Knowledge Graph with built-in flows to engage the user in a multi-turn conversation to disambiguate the path and find the right question. Proceed to the Advanced NLP Configurations section to enable this feature. This is a beta release for this feature and a few more updates are expected in the upcoming releases. . Know more.
- Support for Display Name and Reference Id fields. Display name will be used for presenting the FAQ to the end-users in case of ambiguity while reference id can be used to add a reference to any external content used as a source for a given FAQ. Know more.
- Ability to present all FAQs as ambiguous if only the path is matched and no questions are matched. Know more.
- Ability to customize the order of displaying FAQs for disambiguation. Know more.

Insights & Analytics

Custom Dashboard now allows for exporting the details of a particular widget as a CSV file which can be shared with others and used for downstream processing. Know more.
Ability to identify returning users of a bot. Use the isReturningUser parameter in the BotUserSession context object to identify returning users and customize the experience by sending an appropriate welcome message and more. Know more.
Ability to exclude users or meta tags for filtering NLP Metrics and to view identified traits in the NLP Metrics. Know more.

Administration and Security Enhancements

Introducing support to e-commerce journeys for subscriptions to various plans. Start using the platform with free sessions and pay-as-you-go and be charged only for the consumed sessions. Know more.
SAML enhancements:
- Option to map SAML attributes with various Roles and Groups in the Kore.ai account allies for automating the user authentication.
- Ability to add multiple SAML certificates to support fallback
  Know more
JWE support has been extended to the Webhook channel. Know more.
Node Module has been upgraded to handle Security Vulnerability.

SDK Versions

The following is the recommendation for the versions compatible with this release:

Web/Mobile SDK & Widget SDK:
- version 8.1.0 source GitHub link
- Updated to include listWidget template and to address minor bug fixes.
- Usage guides: Web/Mobile SDK & Widget SDK
BotKit SDK:
- version 8.1.0 source GitHub link
- Updated with Node Module upgrade and minor bug fixes.
- Usage instructions: Botkit SDK