This sprint we added new features across Bots, Knowledge, and Communications as well enhancing performance and stability throughout the platform. Here’s what’s going live next Thursday:

Virtual Assistant (Beta)

We are excited to introduce our brand new Virtual Assistant (“VA”) with this release. This is the culmination of many months of work and will ultimately replace all the various bot types that we have today (Concierge, FAQ, Scheduling, etc.). This will be your one bot to rule them all.

The Virtual Assistant is easier to build and maintain, more conversational, and has more functionality than our previous bots. Your teams will enjoy building it and your customers will love the experience.

We will set up individual sessions and provide you with documentation about how to build new Virtual Assistants, but in the meantime, here is a preview of what’s coming.

Building Experience

We completely overhauled the building experience and have made it faster and more intuitive to build, update, and maintain your Virtual Assistant. Our goal was to make the building accessible to everyone. We replaced lists with a drag-and-drop interface and reorganized how we capture and display data, making it easier to design and follow conversation flows.

Flows & Conversation Nodes

We reorganized all of our bot topics into what we call, “Flows”. Flows are micro conversations that are related to a single topic. Flows make it easy to build and track what your VA knows. They also allow customers to easily navigate between topics and return to previous parts of the conversation seamlessly.

We summarized all of our bot functionality into six core “Nodes.” Nodes are the building blocks of your VA and they allow you to quickly construct robust and dynamic conversations as well as trigger actions both inside and outside of the platform. A builder can drag and drop a node onto the canvas, connect it to another node with a click and have a conversation flow ready to go. It’s that easy.

Q&A Pairs

Generally organizations have a list of common FAQs that they get asked over and over. Your new VA has a dedicated place to quickly capture these questions and answers and can deliver them to your customers at any time. This makes it easy to add new knowledge to your VA.

Intelligence

We built the VA with machine learning at its core. Your VA can better understand your customer’s intent when they ask questions and route them to the proper Flow, Node, or Q&A Pair based on what they asked. The more your customers use your VA, the better it will get at delivering the right answers.

Knowledge Templates

This release we are introducing Content Templates for Knowledge Articles. Content Templates allow teams to create and save common Article frameworks (content + settings) to use as a base when creating new Articles. This allows you to quickly populate a new Article with the right settings, access controls, and content layout with a single click.

For users that have the correct permission, there is a new Templates button in the top navigation of the Knowledge workspace:

From here you can create new Templates and edit existing Templates:

When you create a new Article, you will be able to select from your existing list of saved Templates or create a blank Article:

We also made a number of additional small enhancements to Knowledge:

• Added a “Last Published” and “Last Edited” Date fields on Knowledge Reports
• Fixed an issue with sorting Knowledge Articles by Highest Rated
• Added scroll bars when a user zoom in on the Article editor
• Added a scroll bar in Articles so the Comment button doesn’t get cut off when you have a long list of Related Articles or Comments
• Fixed search queries not appearing on KB Activity report
• Fixed display of emoticons on published Articles
• Fixed an issue preventing videos from autoplaying on Articles when ‘Autoplay’ is turned on
• Fixed some bugs related to creating and editing Tabs in Articles
• Fixed a bug preventing users from decreasing the indent of text after it has been increased
• Updated the ability to download an Article to PDF when there are embedded videos
• Updated the bullet styling to match between the Article edit and view states
• Fixed a bug where the Lower Greek style ordered lists didn’t work
• Fixed a bug where increasing the indent of text added dots above the text

Communication Templates

We are releasing an update to our email Communication Templates for automated emails sent from Boomtown.

The update includes a simplified design to enable faster and easier updates to your automated communications. We added a new WYSIWYG editor and provided a larger layout for streamlined editing.

We also added the ability to create ad-hoc templates that you will be able to trigger with the Automation Engine that is coming with the next release.