My name is Mary and I have recently joined the Customer Success team at Artificial Solutions as a new Teneo developer! After playing around with Teneo studio for a couple of weeks I realized how intuitive and helpful a number of the features were for new users like myself, and so, I wanted to share the details to help others who might be thinking about signing up!
Once you get access to Teneo Studio you’ll quickly understand the power, flexibility and complexity on offer.
Creating Chatbots with Real Teamwork
Who doesn’t like teamwork! Especially when the team resources complement each other. In this dedicated article on conversational AI team, my colleague Agustin gives an overview of the essential roles required for a successful conversational AI project.
The good news is that, with Teneo, you can work on any solution with your team in a shared environment. This makes it easier for the whole team to contribute to building the project. All team members who are invited to collaborate can edit and add components. This way, everyone takes part in the development process of the solution. Let me introduce you to two features in Teneo platform that are team-work focused.
Smooth Localization of Chatbots
Once you have created your bot for a certain language and a specific market, more often than not, you will need to expand your solution to address different languages or markets.
Using Teneo, you will be able to do so efficiently in a process that is called Localization. It is the process of branching out your bot to be able to speak other languages, and to be well-prepared for different regions and markets. You can find details about Localization, and the steps needed to perform it, in our Teneo Developers Community.
I find this feature helpful because you get to choose the components in your main bot to include in the expanded branch bot. Moreover, you can customize the new solution after branching so that it best suits the desired market. Different team members can work on different branches depending on different languages or other branch-specific components.
Version Flags for Your Conversational AI Project
In a team of multiple members working on a growing project, you need to ensure the safety of your working solution and encourage developing it at the same time. You make use of the Version Flags feature by setting your solution to a Stable mode and then work freely on your solution. Whenever you are satisfied with your developing solution you can set a new Stable version and publish it. Moreover, you can always role back to previous Stable versions of a solution. Following this link on Version Flags, you can learn more on how cool Version Flags is as a feature and when to make use of it.
Scalability of Conversational AI Projects
Once you have created an up-and-running bot, you may want to experiment with building extensions to widen the scope of your current bot. However, at the same time you want to keep your functioning bot safe and not fiddled with. As the unwritten golden rule in the technical world states “ if it works fine, do not touch it. ”
In Teneo, you can ensure the separation between your functioning bot and the developing version of your bot with the help of Version Flags . At any point in time, you can decide whether to publish the Stable or the Latest version of your bot. You can find out how to do that following this page on publish your solution.
Graphical User Interface in the Platform
Here is another good feature in the Teneo platform. You can start designing the dialogues of your bot directly in Teneo. You do not need any other tool to visualize the structure of each dialogue in your solution. Unless you like sketching flows with pen and paper first before you start drawing them in Teneo. Have a look at how flows are designed in Teneo. Give it a try yourself!
The image below shows what a flow looks like in Teneo Studio.
Graphic Visualization of Dialogues
In Teneo, dialogues are modeled as Flows which you can easily organize in different folders, so they are easy to find. I found it quite easy to create new flows and design them as I wish with help of the easily accessed components places in the Ribbon Bar above each flow canvas.
TODO Labels
This is another cool feature which you will find very helpful. Highlighted TODO labels which will appear along the flow in different places indicating an action needed and providing some information on how to resolve each of these labels.
Built-in Resources for Conversational Solutions
The Teneo platform allows you to build conversational AI solutions in 86 languages. In addition, you can choose to make use of the built-in Dialogue and Lexical Resources that are available for a selection of these languages . If you want to know which languages are available so far, check out the list of supported languages in Teneo.
Dialogue Resources are pre-built flows which will help your chatbot handle common conversations such as greetings and small talk. Whereas Lexical Resources are predefined language objects so that your bot will have already learned some common vocabulary and phrases as soon as you create it. The image below is an illustration of the difference in the performance of a chatbot with and without Dialogue Resources.
These resources are useful, in my opinion, because you want to spend your time teaching the bot more customized dialogues and vocabulary rather than teaching it how to answer common requests or recognize simple phrases.
Low code/ Pro-code for Conversational AI Projects
Conversational AI projects have various functions and scopes. Some are built to handle basic conversational tasks, while others have more complex set of tasks to perform.
As you start a project, you decide what your bot is required to do and, depending on the complexity of the tasks, you either go for a low-code solution or a pro-code one. I found Teneo specifically useful in this regard, because the platform allows you to start building a functioning solution with minimal coding requirements, depending on your project. Moreover, when you decide to scale-up your solution and add complexity to your bot, you can easily implement further integrations that connect your bot to external services.
An example of such integrations and a tutorial on implementing it is available via this page on adding an integration. You can also watch our webinar on how much code is needed for building a chatbot from earlier this year; where some of our conversational AI experts discuss the topic of low-code/ pro-code in conversational AI projects and platforms.
Data Connectors on Teneo
Whenever you publish your solution, and as soon as you get some traffic coming into it, you will have a great amount of very useful data stored in your Teneo Studio, in the Log Data Source to be specific. You can view and analyze your data from inside the solution as described on our developers’ page under Analyze Log Data.
In Teneo, you can use any BI tool for visualizing your reports thanks to our Inquire API. Additionally, you can find data connectors for Google Charts and Microsoft Power BI already available within our Data Connectors.
For example, you can see in the image below an overview dashboard in Power BI with detailed information starting with numbers of session and API calls in total, latest month, and latest week… etc. In addition to charts for triggered flows.
This is a useful feature, in my opinion, because it allows you to share analyses related to your solution with people outside your team as well. You get to share such reports with people who are interested in the performance of your bot, and you can gather insights on optimizations needed to improve your bot.
You can have a look at the different data connectors on Teneo and check out some sample dashboards if you go to the Data Connectors page on our developers’ site. Additionally, you can watch our webinar on Teneo + Power BI to learn more on how to easily build a Power BI dashboard connected to a Teneo solution .
You and Teneo
These were some of the features that I thought were fun to work with in Teneo so far. What Teneo features do you find most useful?
If you haven’t done that already, go ahead and give Teneo a try by creating a developer account with a 90-day free trial . If you have any questions or want to tell us what you like most about Teneo, please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts on Teneo Developers Community!