Month: September 2019

ServiceNow New York – Natural Language Understanding

ServiceNow New York release introduces Natural Language Understanding (NLU), providing your users with greater experience and enhances the effectiveness of your Virtual Agent conversations.

New York offers NLU plugins for CSM, HR and ITSM. Dedicated NLU models have been provided for each of those areas, allowing to turn small-talk and any seemingly random utterances of the users into relevant Virtual Agent topics. This results in a swift resolution of the user’s query. In addition, you can build and configure your own NLU models using the ServiceNow Studio!

NLU Availability: subscription-based
How to activate: admin via Plugins module

How ServiceNow NLU works

Within each model, the Virtual Agent will use the following NLU objects to identify what the user would like to do:

• Utterances: Natural input from the user, e.g. “I’m going on holiday from tomorrow until next Sunday”.
• Intent: the action that ServiceNow understands based on the utterance, e.g. Request: Leave of Absence.
• Entities: any keywords (regex based) that ServiceNow can use to determine what/who/when/where and so on, e.g.: Start: tomorrow (05.09.19), End: next Sunday (22.09.2019).

With NLU enabled, the Virtual Agent can even handle conversation switching from topic to topic.

ServiceNow New York – dev tools

Syntax Editor has been revamped and, aside new aesthetically pleasing way of displaying APIs, script includes, and tables, we get a new context menu, that allows quick access to the following information for:

• APIs like GlideRecord – docs page with documentation on that API,
• Script Includes – definition of that script include,
• Tables – either definition record of that table or list of all records in that table,
• A bunch of new Scoped APIs were also added, e.g. for DynamicTranslation.

As well as other interesting functionalities, like Remote Tables, which allow developers to connect to an external data source and display data from that source in list or form view within ServiceNow – as if it was 1 of SN tables.

Availability: free (part of the ServiceNow Platform)
How to get: comes with the New York upgrade

Instance data replication

Instance Data Replication in the ServiceNow New York release allows to copy data from one instance (called Producer Instance), to one or more target instances (called Consumer Instances). To utilize this feature, a replication set must be defined on both instances, containing the tables and columns which should be replicated.

This is useful e.g. in moving incremental updates from one instance to another, or in localization of data across different instances. It allows you to keep instances in sync, and you are able to define Transformations to copy data to different tables or fields, or Adapters to perform string or mathematical operations on source data before it is stored on target instance. The replication can also be bi-directional.

Dynamic translation

ServiceNow New York release comes with a powerful API for detecting the input language for custom texts like Descriptions, Additional Comments etc. entered by the users, as well as translating this text “on-the-fly” into target language.

The plugin comes with a Flow Designer REST action as well as 2 Integration Spokes for:

• Microsoft Azure,
• IBM Watson.

What is particularly handy about this feature, are its dedicated APIs to add dynamic translations to Server side entities, Client side entities as well as Service Portal. You can easily add dynamic translation to a field by going to the field’s dictionary and adding a new attribute.

Availability: free (part of the ServiceNow Platform)
How to get: comes with New York upgrade

ServiceNow New York – mobile application

ServiceNow mobile application enables ServiceNow users to:

• Submit new records (e.g. incidents or requests),
• Manage existing tasks,
• Approve of or reject tasks,
• Sign documents,
• Request help from Agent Chat.

Now Mobile application can integrate with user’s mobile device to take certain actions in the application itself – using the mobiles default photo, messaging or keyboard. Additionally, the application is customizable – you can personalize aspects, from view or layout to specifying the data displayed in your records.

How to get: comes with the New York upgrade

Guided Application Creator

Guided Application Creator is a new tool making setting up new application even easier than it is! Thanks to this brand new application, you can specify the entry requirement before the actual development starts. The creator enables to create:

• Application,
• User roles,
• Tables,

And:

• Design user experience.

In terms of user experience, it is possible to create the application in 3 distinct experiences:

• Workspace (available only if the Agent Workspace plugin is activated),
• Mobile,
• Classic.

Setting up an application with this tool is the first step in creating the application. Later on, it can be further developed with Studio, Flow Designer, or Team Development.

Availability: Subscription-based
How to activate: Admin via Plugins module

Predictive Intelligence

Predictive Intelligence introduces 3 separate frameworks, each of which enables different opportunities to teach the system how to approach data in terms of their prediction and recommendation of outcomes. These frameworks are:

• Classification – enabling ML algorithms to populate field values while creating new records in ServiceNow based on previous record-handling experience.
• Similarity – enabling ML to identify existing records with values similar to new records and create a word corpus.
• Clustering – enabling ML to group similar records to clusters in order to address to them collectively or to identify patterns related to their features.

The classification and similarity frameworks support these 8 languages:

• English,
• French,
• German,
• Japanese,
• Dutch,
• Spanish,
• Italian,
• Brazilian Portuguese.

The clustering framework only supports the English language.