What's new in conversational channels 8.7
Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) and Pega Email Bot use artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) to help provide essential business services to users in a conversational and consistent way, without users having to interact with a human agent.
Usability and performance improvements during email triaging
Pega Email Bot has been updated to make the system more reliable and easier for customer service representatives (CSRs) to address customer requests.
CSRs can now save email drafts and simultaneously work on unrelated tasks in the Email Manager or Case Manager portal, making email triaging of customer inquiries more efficient. The overall performance of the system is improved, for example, when CSRs view a large amount of data for a triage case that includes file attachments.
CSRs can also quickly troubleshoot email delivery issues, after they send or forward emails to customers and other stakeholders. If there is an issue with the delivery of emails, the system displays a warning notification describing the reason for this action. The following figure shows a notification about an undelivered email specifying that the domain name service (DNS) did not find a valid email address for a recipient:
For more information, see Replying to customers by email for an email bot and Forwarding emails to other stakeholders for an email bot.
Support for multiple languages in the Digital Messaging chatbots
To better support globally distributed business solutions, your Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) for Digital Messaging can now communicate with customers in any language supported by the chatbot.
When you configure the IVA channel, you can specify the languages that the chatbot supports and provide translations so that the application knows how to perform text analysis and respond in the language of choice for a user. With the preview console you can verify chatbot responses and train the model in the selected language. The following figure shows where in the user interface you configure language support for a Digital Messaging channel:
The default language for a chatbot is the first language that you define in the supported languages list. The default language acts as the fallback language for the chatbot if no translation is yet available for one of the other languages supported by the chatbot. For a complete list of supported languages that you can use with the Digital Messaging chatbot for text analysis and processing, see Language support for NLP.
For more information, see Creating a Digital Messaging channel, Defining response commands for a conversational channel, Defining topics for text analysis for an IVA, Creating training data manually for an IVA, and Editing the conversation smart shapes.
Other enhancements
Read about minor enhancements in Pega Platform version 8.7.
JSON Web Token authentication for the Digital Messaging channel
If your security team requires using JSON Web Token (JWT) authentication, you can now implement this alternative security method to authorize requests during communication between Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) for Digital Messaging and social messaging platforms. JWT authentication is an industry-standard method that permits the sender to sign a request with a unique token that the receiver later verifies, to ensure that the obtained request is valid and that the token did not expire.
You can select JWT authentication when you configure Digital Messaging security for your application as long as Pega has provisioned your Manager ID and Manager Key credentials for this authentication method. For more information, see Configuring Digital Messaging channel security and Setting up the IVA for Web Messaging.
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