DRYiCE Lucy v5.0

The release notes capture the details of features and functionalities introduced in DRYiCE Lucy as part of its Major release version 5.0. This major release follows assisted upgrade, details on the same can be found in the Upgrading and Installation section.

What’s new?

Following are the newly launched features and functionalities as part of DRYiCE Lucy v5.0:

Use Case Design Console (UCD): Console for admin users or Cognitive SME’s to configure, train and manage Use Cases in DRYiCE Lucy. Below are the salient features of UCD.

• Admin users or Cognitive SMEs will no longer require access of IBM Watson Assistant for creating, managing use cases.
• It provides functionalities such as Flow Snippets, Variation analysis etc. which ensure faster use case implementation with insights on training of use cases.
• UCD has no impact on the existing use cases created using IBM Watson Assistant within an environment. Any additions/changes to existing Use Cases can be done through UCD.
• Other functionalities available for Cognitive SMEs, Admin users of UCD are as given below:
  1. Intent Training
  2. Entity Training
  3. Dialog Flow Management
  4. Try It Window
  5. Variation Analysis
  6. Language Specific Training
  7. Skill Management
  8. Multi-Skill Management
  9. Unresolved Queries Training
• The console is available as a default console in v5.0

Conversational Analytics Console: The Kibana ELK driven dashboard for admin users to create custom visualizations of DRYiCE Lucy metrics. The other details pertaining to this Console are as follows:

• The console is in addition to the already existing Reporting dashboard and needs to be enabled on request in v5.0
• The custom visualization templates can be created with regional breakdown of the metrics shown below:
  1. Total Conversation
  2. Conversation Feedback
  3. User Metrices (e.g. Total Users, Unique Users, Repeat Users etc.)
• The visualizations created as part of this console are downloadable in nature (Format supported is pdf)

Cognitive Analytics Module: This console enables Supervised learning by capturing conversations and actionable details wherever Use Case Training/ Re-training is required. The Use Case Training/ Re-training is undertaken by the Cognitive SME or the admin user.

• This console needs to be enabled on request in v5.0
• This console ensures faster implementation and implementation of the concept of “Learning from failure” in DRYiCE Lucy

Out of The Box (OTB) Flow Snippets: One click training, addition of OTB Use Cases in DRYiCE Lucy through UCD. This ensures faster implementation timeline of Use Cases with the required customizations. Over 100+ OTB Use Cases are offered as part of the current release which includes intents, entities and dialog flow.

Schedule Meetings: OTB Use Case functionality in DRYiCE Lucy which allows users to schedule meetings on MS Outlook while having conversations with DRYiCE Lucy. The Use Case flow can be customized as per client requirements.

What’s enhanced?

Following are some of the existing features and functionalities that have been improved upon as part of DRYiCE v5.0:

Product Support: Additional functionalities with dedicated support dashboard for the Product support team. Admin users can track, manage product support tickets. This improves the overall Resolution and Handling time of ticket, with better visibility and ticket prioritization in a customer environment. The functionalities added as part of Product Support are as follows:

• Exporting Ticket list in CSV, Excel or PDF format
• Archiving old tickets
• Adding options for displaying tenant’s information for which ticket is raised
• Providing attachment options while creating support ticket
• Support communication mailers notifying users about the ticket status and action to be taken

Announcements: The Announcement section acts as a notification mechanism in case of any planned downtime/maintenance activities. Below are the functionalities of this section:

• Auto emails triggered to the registered users in case of any critical issues
• View announcements details such as maintenance Start and End date with the details of services and regions affected
• The section is updated every 15 minutes
• Notification Mails are triggered for high priority and critical issues to the designated SPOCs

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​User navigation and Log reporting: Provider admins get the functionality to view various login activities of admin users on product consoles.  The heightened visibility through tracking of admin activities assists in auditing purposes.

​​​​​​​Survey and CSAT Feedback: Improvements on Satisfaction and Feedback capturing capabilities. Tracking on feedbacks triggers and flow. Custom Feedback, Satisfaction and Survey capability driven from Cognitive Engine to effectively capture user's feedback at any part of the use case flow.

Open Whisk Refinement: An existing feature enhancement which allows admin users to do activation tracking, providing online edit and execution functionality. This assists in faster implementation timelines for new product integrations.

Reporting Dashboard: An existing feature enhancement which extends capability of the reporting dashboard to load from local UI. Other functionalities added on the Reporting Dashboard are listed below:​​​​​​​

• Custom date filters update
• Dashboard as a Single Page Application altogether
• Added Table for overall intents that lists the use case from all the regions along with functionalities such as Count, Resolution response received, etc.
• Pictorial representation of Conversational metrics

Following are some of the bugs fixed as part of the DRYiCE Lucy v5.0 release:

• Frontend Bugfixes on UMS and Password Policy Settings
• UMS Change Password timeout issue
• Multi Message Question Recognition on First Response only
• Bot framework button choice issue
• Reporting dashboard deployment sync issues
• Bot connect API dynamic feedback capture from master configuration
• UI changes on Global Admin and Cognitive Console

The following changes were done which in turn improve the performance of v5.0 in comparison to the older versions.

• Node JS Modules related to security and performance
• OTB rules for sending mails, get SOP’s and personality queries
• Cloundant instance based actions
• Optimized local fetch for asset controller

Following are the limitations/Restrictions of the features and functionalities released as part of DRYiCE Lucy v5.0:

• Folders, Slots, autocomplete and move functionality are not supported on UI in UCD console. However, this doesn’t impact Use Case training capabilities
• Multi-lingual is only supported under detection model in Channels and BOT connect API
• Dedicated training can be done over multi-skills feature instead of multi-lingual on dedicated for channels other than web. This is due to absence of language selection dropdown
• Third party integrations and tools like ELK are not part of Lucy applications. To be provisioned or acquired based on the requirement with respect to implementation

DRYiCE Lucy is hosted on IBM Cloud and utilizes IBM PaaS services. System Requirements is Not Applicable (NA).

DRYiCE Lucy v5.0 release is a Major version release which includes Assisted Upgradation. DRYiCE Lucy follows Zero downtime deployment strategy (Blue Green Deployment) with automatic rollback in case of failure of deployment for any feature/ functionality during the upgrade.

Following is the recommended approach on Upgrading to DRYiCE Lucy v5.0:

• Review Release notes of Lucy 5.0 major release
• Confirm if Lucy tenant is in scope for upgrade. (i.e. Ensure DRYiCE Lucy version is 4.2. In case of older versions, contact support.dryice.ai@hcl.com  for upgradation process)
• Review existing feature or notable changes that needs to be validated after upgrades.
• Confirm plans to enable or disable features as part of new release
• Confirm the slots for upgrading the tenants
• Based on the provisioning model, the following two approaches can be followed:
  1. Provider owned model will have upgrade card for the tenants which are eligible or not upgraded through which the tenant can be upgraded
  2. Provider managed model will require the Provider Admin or Provider SPOC to contact Product Support for upgrading the tenants
• If provider owned model, the provider admin or the provider SPOC can follow the steps mentioned in the upgrade page for upgrading the tenant automatically.
  1. Lucy 5.0 comes with one click automated upgrade feature that upgrades the tenant in few minutes

DRYiCE Lucy is a Cognitive Virtual Assistant. It mimics human interaction, learns and adapts to user needs through smart conversations by leveraging enterprise-grade Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML). Users can use Lucy to find the relevant information available across different enterprise systems.

Lucy helps organizations move up the maturity curve and enhance the user experience for employees and customers. By leveraging advanced natural language processing Lucy reduces human errors and increases productivity. It comes with out-of- the-box use cases for various scenarios and can be easily extended to cover the “Cognitive chatbot” needs of modern enterprises.

For support related inquiries, please reach us at support.dryice.ai@hcl.com