Release notes
November 20-24, 2023
Bot managing experience
When you're creating Actions, we've added some examples to the UI to help you write your paths. For more information, see Use JMESPath to save a portion of a JSON API response.
We've made several improvements to Ada Voice:
You can now use a different phone number to send and receive SMS messages during voice conversations than the phone number that your bot uses to receive phone calls. For more information, see Connect your Twilio account with your Ada bot.
We've added the Smart Capture block, which sends the caller's response to an external language processing service to help understand what they said and save a more accurate output. For more information, see Use the Smart Capture block to intelligently capture callers' responses.
October 23-27, 2023
Bot managing experience
We've moved a few things around in the Conversations view:
In the Details panel, we've removed the tabs, so you can see resolution classification information and meta variable information in the same place.
We've moved the link to view other conversations from the same chatter into the top header, under the chatter's name.
If your bot is configured to show messages whenever a variable's value changes, you can now turn those messages off. For more information, see Show or hide variable change messages.
In bots that serve generative content from your knowledge base, in Actions, we've made it required to add a name for each API output. This was optional before, but we've determined that adding names allows the bot to integrate API data into responses more consistently. For more information, see Configure API calls in your generative bot with Actions.
October 16-20, 2023
Bot managing experience
In bots that serve generative content from your knowledge base, we've introduced the ability to configure API calls, so your bot can fetch information for your chatters on demand. For more information, see Configure API calls in your generative bot with Actions.
September 25-29, 2023
Bot managing experience
In our ongoing efforts to ensure the highest quality and accuracy of your chatbot's responses, we've decided to deprecate the Auto-training feature. A few key factors influenced this decision:
Precision and Control: Auto-training, at times, added less relevant training questions to the Answers, which could impact the bot's response precision. We believe in providing clarity and direct control over the chatbot training process, ensuring richer interactions.
NLU Advancements: Our newly improved Natural Language Understanding (NLU) model now boosts accuracy in predicting declarative Answers by 5-8%, eliminating reliance on automatic training. The enhanced comprehension makes Ada's predictions even more accurate.
What this change means:
Ada bots will no longer self-train based on chatters' thumbs-up feedback.
On the Ada dashboard, under Settings > Bot setup > Answers, we've removed the Auto-training section.
For more information on how to effectively train your bot, see Training best practices.
For Voice bots, we've improved the experience around giving the bot more time to process things like API calls. We've removed the artificial typing sound, and replaced it with periodic messages like "one moment" to fill any silence. For more information, see Minimize pauses while your bot performs backend actions.
In bots that serve generative content from your knowledge base, we've introduced the ability to guide bots' behavior by creating custom instructions for it to follow. For more information, see Customize your bot's generative content with Guidance.
September 18-22, 2023
Bot managing experience
For generative bots, which automatically generate responses to chatters using knowledge base content, you can now customize your bot's behavior with custom instructions called Guidance. For more information, see Customize your bot's generative content with Guidance.
September 4-8, 2023
Bot managing experience
Dashboard
To improve security, we've changed how we limit login attempts. Before, we limited login attempts to 5 attempts per minute per IP address, but have now changed the limit to 5 attempts per minute per email address.
We've removed the ability to upload profile pictures.
August 28 - September 1, 2023
Handoffs
After a handoff occurs through Zendesk Messaging, Zendesk Messaging tickets originating from your bot will now be tracked in Zendesk through the "messaging" channel source. We're making this change to better comply with Zendesk's new omnichannel routing and reporting capabilities that rely on the "messaging" channel source.
This change takes effect once a chatter starts a new chat session. For bots that have long persistence settings, you or your agents may wish to tell chatters to clear their caches to display the updated channel source. For more information, see Agent Experience.
August 21-25, 2023
Bot managing experience
In Voice bots, you can now add custom bot vocabulary, so your bot can more easily pick out terms that are specific to your brand or your industry. For more information, see Help your voice bot understand special terms.
July 10-14, 2023
Conversation experience
We've made several improvements to Ada Voice:
We've been working on reducing latency for blocks that perform backend actions (e.g., the HTTP Request, Set Variable, Answer Utilities, or Actions blocks). You can now strategically build Answer flows to significantly reduce pauses when these blocks appear and improve caller experiences. For more information, see Minimize pauses while your bot performs backend actions.
We've added a Play button
to blocks that contain spoken content, so you can test your content directly in the dashboard.
In the menu where you can see an Answer's parent Answers, we've added an icon where you can easily see whether the parent Answer has live content for messaging, voice, or both.
When you're editing an Answer and click Test Answer, the testing window now opens to the same modality you were editing, depending on whether you were in the Messaging or Phone tab.
The Messaging and Phone tabs now stick to the top of your screen, so it's easier to keep track of which modality you're editing content for.
June 19-23, 2023
Bot managing experience
We've introduced Ada's new free plan, which you can use to create bots that run entirely on generative AI. These bots write their own replies using content from Zendesk Guide, with no additional bot building necessary.
For more information, see our documentation, or sign up to get started with your own free plan bot.
In the Answer Utilities block, we've removed the 1024 character limit for the Render Templated Text action's output. Previously, if the output was too long, it would show 1021 characters followed by
...
and would truncate the rest of the output.
Conversation experience
For Voice bots, we've reduced the time it takes for the bot to respond when it encounters Set Variable and HTTP Request blocks.
Handoffs
We've updated our Zendesk Messaging handoff to align with Zendesk's best practices for bot partners. While there are no changes to the builder or end user experience, please note that Zendesk Messaging tickets originating from your bot will now be tracked in Zendesk through a new channel source, "Sunshine Conversations API," instead of "messaging." Your Zendesk administrator may want to update your triggers and automations in Zendesk to leverage this new channel.
You can read more about configuring Zendesk Messaging with Ada in our guide Configure and use Ada Glass for Zendesk Messaging.
May 22-26, 2023
Bot managing experience
We've updated the Fetch Chat Metadata block, so it now only saves the current conversation with a chatter. Previously, it saved every message from all conversations the chatter had with the bot, which resulted in handoffs containing very long transcripts and irrelevant content.
This change primarily impacts channels where chatter IDs don't change between chatter interactions with an Ada bot, which includes third party channels (Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp), Voice, and bots that have their chatter persistence settings set to "Never Forget."
May 8-12, 2023
Conversation experience
We fixed a display bug that caused the text that chatters entered to overlap with the Send button and shift when the text wrapped to new lines.
May 1-5, 2023
Bot managing experience
Our bot invitation emails now have "Activate your Ada account" as the subject line instead of "Invitation," so they're easier to spot in your inbox.
We've refined the prompt we use for AI rephrasing to better filter out inappropriate content.
Dashboard
When you're uploading a custom icon to use for your bot avatar, you can now use .png, .jpg, or .gif files, in addition to .svg files.
Channels
You can now use Sunshine Conversations Web as a channel. If you're interested, contact your Ada team for assistance.
Handoffs
We fixed an issue with our Zendesk Live Chat handoff that was causing chatters to get stuck in a waiting state.
We fixed an issue where images that Zendesk Live Chat agents sent appeared as links to chatters.
April 24-27, 2023
Bot managing experience
For new bots, we've stopped creating default quick replies.
We fixed a bug affecting time conversions for some time zones.
April 17-21, 2023
Conversation experience
We fixed an issue where screen readers would read out entire URLs for widgets. Now, they read out a dedicated aria-label instead.
April 10-14, 2023
Bot managing experience
We've updated our Ada Widget SDK. See the changelog and how to access the latest version here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@ada-support/ada-widget-sdk.
Dashboard
In the HTTP Request block, we've added the ability to copy test HTTP request responses to your clipboard. At the top of the response body, there's a new Copy icon
.
We fixed a bug that caused all Quick Reply buttons to display Answer titles, even if those Answers had different Answer Labels. This bug was only present in the dashboard and not in chat.
We fixed a bug that prevented Quick Reply button text from showing translated Answer labels. This bug was only present in the dashboard and not in chat.
We fixed a bug that prevented dragging and dropping Answers to either reorder them or move them between folders.
Conversation experience
We've fixed an accessibility issue that prevented chatters using screen readers from easily focusing on the Cancel button to close iFrames containing custom web widgets.
March 27-31, 2023
Dashboard
We fixed a bug where Smart Search wasn't coming up for a client's Salesforce or Zendesk knowledge bases.
We fixed a bug where the dashboard would time out when updating folders for large bots.
We fixed a bug that was causing training groups to not display for some large bots.
Handoffs
We fixed a bug that allowed Ada to respond to new messages after an agent closed a ticket without having to see a passControl first.
AI
Improve and Create Variations are now available across all languages. Use these GPT-powered features to rephrase your multilingual Answer content, and to provide variations, to improve the conversational tone of your Answers.
We have upgraded Improve and Create Variations to GPT-3.5-Turbo.
We have improved our knowledge base parsing system so it removes documents that have duplicate content.
Additionally, our knowledge base parsing system also includes URLs when indexing chunks.
APIs
We have improved our logging around Spot node availability/termination.
We have launched a new dev2-green EKS cluster, which now serves all traffic in our dev2 environment.
We have enabled Loft & DevSpace on our new green cluster.
March 20-24, 2023
Dashboard
When you drag a Builder Note into an Answer, the block now automatically opens in edit mode.
We fixed a bug that was preventing Quick Reply blocks from showing up when you searched for them.
If you have an Answer open in the dashboard and delete it, rather than staying in the deleted answer, you now go back to your Answers list.
We have added more information to the login page, so we can keep you posted with the latest Ada news.
Handoffs
We fixed a bug that caused some Answer training from the Improve tab to fail.