AtBot June 2019 Update
The summer of 2019 brings us the most “human” update ever to AtBot. A handful of new features will vastly improve your bot’s ability to carry on fluid conversations with your users. This update includes some new things in Power Automate, some new things in the AtBot Admin Portal, and some updates to how AtBot integrates with QnA Maker.
Branching and Multitasking
The most exciting update to AtBot is the ability for your bots to multitask by branching out of skills and then back — fluidly — like a real conversation. Many of the AtBot actions in Power Automate now have an advanced property called Allow Branching.
When set to Yes, any text response from the user during that action will be processed through LUIS and QnA Maker to determine if the user is looking for information from another Skill or has a question they need an answer before they continue on with the current Skill.
If this property is set to No, the bot will require the user to finish that action before moving on. Have a look at the video below for a quick explanation of this new feature.
One of the coolest parts about AtBot’s ability to branch is the capability to pass data back from a child Skill to the one that it branched from. So, instead of allowing the user to branch off and forget the previous Skill, the bot can bring them back and use data they collected in the branched Skill!
For more information on passing data back from a child Skill, have a look at the reference in our documentation.
QnA Maker Multi-Turn & Active Learning Support
Multi-turn is a new feature in QnA Maker that allows knowledge bases to have a hierarchy in their content. With this hierarchy, users can be presented with prompts when they ask questions about a subject that has multiple child results.
AtBot makes integrating with multi-turn a breeze. Any bot that is connected to a QnA Maker KB that has multi-turn enabled will automatically display prompts to the user and function properly with context when users interact with your bot. No coding necessary!
In addition to the multi-turn support, AtBot now supports Active Learning in QnA Maker. Again, you don’t need to do anything to make this work in AtBot; it’s just magic. Ambiguous questions will return with a prompt for the correct question and AtBot can automatically send that back to QnA Maker in a feedback loop to make your KBs smarter!
WebChat V4 Support
We have updated the AtBot Admin Portal to default the Test & Embed code to the latest WebChat V4 library from Microsoft. In addition to updating to this latest library, we have included some helpful methods you can use to enhance the functionality of your bots on the page. Check out the Test & Embed window of your bot to see these methods.
Finally, we have also updated the embed code in the portal to automatically display your bot as a tab in the lower right of your site and float when clicked (see the bot on https://atbot.io for an example). This makes it just a copy-and-paste to get your bot onto your site!
AtBot brings AI within reach
AtBot is the premiere bot-as-a-service solution for the Microsoft cloud. Built completely within Azure, AtBot is your out-of-the-box, easy-to-configure bot for Teams, SharePoint, or the web. Teach AtBot tasks using Power Automate, make him your corporate source of knowledge with QnA Maker, help him understand almost anything your colleagues could ask thanks to LUIS, and manage his features with the AtBot Admin Portal. Get going with AtBot Free or start your free trial of AtBot Premium today.
