What is Zia Skills?
Zia Skills is an AI driven platform to build a conversational assistant for your business applications that converse through voice or text. You can interact with any bots built on Zia Skills in conversational English - just like how you speak or text a fellow human being. All bots built on Zia Skills can accept inputs and respond in a textual format, while a bot embedded in a mobile app can additionally listen to your voice and talk back to you.
For understanding the intent of your message, Zia Skills is intact with its natural language understanding (NLU) ability, which comprehends your messages and respond conversationally.
Bots built on Zia Skills can be embedded into your application's front end for your app users to interact with it. Every bot can be configured with multiple conversational abilities or actions.
Each ability or action of a bot can be configured to perform any custom business logic, as per your application's requirement. This business logic can be developed in Deluge, Zoho's native online scripting language and can be hosted in Zoho's serverless environment. Alternatively, Zia Skills also allows you to develop business logic in any programming language of your choice, hosted in a public server and accessible to Zia Skills through a REST API.
Basic workflow of a bot
When an input message is received, Zia Skills understands the intent of the input message and compares it with sample sentences of pre-configured action using NLU. If the message does not appear to match with any of the actions, the bot would respond that it could not understand the message.
If an action is matched with the input message, bot would prompt details (if needed) to fulfill that ability in a conversational way. For instance, if you are trying to book an event, the bot may prompt questions to get the details like the name of the event, start time, end time and location. After getting the required details, it executes the business logic of the action and gives a reply message to the user.
Embedding a developed bot into your app
The developed bots need to be embedded into your application's front end (website or mobile app), for your application's users to use it. Zia Skills' Bot SDKs are available for Web, Android and iOS applications, which can be used to embed your bot into your application's front end, with minimal coding effort.
Usage Analytics of the bot
Zia Skills provides stats on the usage of your bots. Based on this data, you can improve your bot by adding missing functionalities or improving less used functionalities.
Development & Production Environments
In order to make changes on a deployed bot without affecting the existing usage, separate Development and Production environments are provided in Zia Skills. Any changes that you make will happen only in the Development environment by default and all changes can be tested thoroughly here. Once everything is ready, the changes can be deployed to the Production environment.