vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
Save the changes to the JSON file, and then upload the edited file, overwriting the existing skill.







 Configuring bidirectional languages 

For bidirectional languages, such as Arabic, you can change your skill preferences.



1. From your skill tile, click the Actions drop-down menu, and then select Language Preferences.

This option is only available for skills that are configured to use a bidirectional language.
2. Select from the following options for your skill:



* GUI Direction: Specifies the layout direction of elements, such as buttons or menus, in the graphical user interface. Choose LTR (left-to-right) or RTL (right-to-left). If not specified, the tool follows the web browser GUI direction setting.
* Text Direction: Specifies the direction of typed text. Choose LTR (left-to-right) or RTL (right-to-left), or select Auto which will automatically choose the text direction based on your system settings. The None option will display left-to-right text.
* Numeric Shaping: Specifies which form of numerals to use when presenting regular digits. Choose from Nominal, Arabic-Indic, or Arabic-European. The None option will display Western numerals.
* Calendar Type: Specifies how you choose filtering dates in the skill UI. Choose Islamic-Civil, Islamic-Tabular, Islamic-Umm al-Qura, or Gregorian.



This setting is not reflected in the "Try it out" panel.

![Bidi options](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs-content/v1/content/417db917d18067d9dcc4cf2612564a9a87c3ddc8/assistant/images/bidi-options.png)
3. Click the X to close the page. Your changes are saved automatically.







 Working with accented characters 

In a conversational setting, users might or might not use accents while interacting with the Watson Assistant service. As such, both accented and non-accented versions of words might be treated the same for intent detection and entity recognition.
Adding a skill to your assistant 

Customize your assistant by adding to it the skills it needs to satisfy your customers' goals.

You can create the following types of skills:



* Dialog skill: Uses Watson natural language processing and machine learning technologies to understand user questions and requests, and respond to them with answers that are authored by you.
* Search skill: For a given user query, uses the IBM Watson® Discovery service to search a data source of your self-service content and return an answer.



Typically, you create a skill of each type first. Then, as you build a dialog for the dialog skill, you decide when to initiate the search skill. For some questions or requests, a hardcoded or programmatically-derived response (that is defined in the dialog skill) is sufficient. For others, you might want to provide a more robust response by returning a full passage of related information (that is extracted from an external data source by using the search skill).



 Dialog skill 

A dialog skill contains the training data and logic that enables an assistant to help your customers. It contains the following types of artifacts:



* [Intents](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant-data?topic=assistant-data-intents): An intent represents the purpose of a user's input, such as a question about business locations or a bill payment. You define an intent for each type of user request you want your application to support. In the tool, the name of an intent is always prefixed with the character. To train the dialog skill to recognize your intents, you supply lots of examples of user input and indicate which intents they map to.

A content catalog is provided that contains prebuilt common intents you can add to your application rather than building your own. For example, most applications require a greeting intent that starts a dialog with the user. You can add the General content catalog to add an intent that greets the user and does other useful things, like end the conversation.
The language property is set to the original language of the skill. For example, the language property is en for an English skill.
4. Change the value of this property to the language you want to use instead. For example, change it to fr for French or de for German.
5. Save the changes to the JSON file, and then upload the edited file, overwriting the existing skill.







 Configuring bidirectional languages 

For bidirectional languages, such as Arabic, you can change your skill preferences.



1. From your skill tile, click the Actions drop-down menu, and then select Language Preferences.

This option is only available for skills that are configured to use a bidirectional language.
2. Select from the following options for your skill:



* GUI Direction: Specifies the layout direction of elements, such as buttons or menus, in the graphical user interface. Choose LTR (left-to-right) or RTL (right-to-left). If not specified, the tool follows the web browser GUI direction setting.
* Text Direction: Specifies the direction of typed text. Choose LTR (left-to-right), RTL (right-to-left), or Auto (which automatically chooses the text direction based on your system settings). The None option displays left-to-right text.
* Numeric Shaping: Specifies which form of numerals to use when presenting regular digits. Choose from Nominal, Arabic-Indic, or Arabic-European. The None option will display Western numerals.
* Calendar Type: Specifies how you choose filtering dates in the skill UI. Choose Islamic-Civil, Islamic-Tabular, Islamic-Umm al-Qura, or Gregorian.



This setting is not reflected in the Try it out panel.

![Bidi options](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs-content/v1/content/a2b18c153837bce00a5b4de496e4b4ca64bbf56e/assistant-data/images/bidi-options.png)
3. Click the X to close the page.
This version of the tool was evaluated by beta program participants over the past several months.



* Skills: What you think of as a workspace is now called a skill. A dialog skill is a container for the natural language processing training data and artifacts that enable your assistant to understand user questions, and respond to them.



Where are my workspaces? Any workspaces that you created previously are now listed in your service instance as skills. Click the Skills tab to see them. For more information, see [Adding skills to your assistant](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant?topic=assistant-skill-add).



* Assistants: You can now publish your skill in just two steps. Add your skill to an assistant, and then set up one or more integrations with which to deploy your skill. The assistant adds a layer of function to your skill that enables Watson Assistant to orchestrate and manage the flow of information for you. See [Assistants](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant?topic=assistant-assistants).
* Built-in integrations: Instead of going to the Deploy tab to deploy your workspace, you add your dialog skill to an assistant, and add integrations to the assistant through which the skill is made available to your users. You do not need to build a custom front-end application and manage the conversation state from one call to the next. However, you can still do so if you want to. See [Adding integrations](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant?topic=assistant-deploy-integration-add) for more information.
* New major API version: A V2 version of the API is available. This version provides access to methods you can use to interact with an assistant at run time. No more passing context with each API call; the session state is managed for you as part of the assistant layer.



What is presented in the tooling as a dialog skill is effectively a wrapper for a V1 workspace. There are currently no API methods for authoring skills and assistants with the V2 API. However, you can continue to use the V1 API for authoring workspaces.
This documentation is for the classic Watson Assistant experience. To see the documentation for the new Watson Assistant, please go [here](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/watson-assistant).



 Adding support for global audiences 

Your customers come from all around the globe. You need an assistant that can talk to them in their own language and in a familiar style. Choose the approach that best fits your business needs.



* Quickest solution: The simplest way to add language support is to author the conversational skill in a single language. You can translate each message that is sent to your assistant from the customer's local language to the skill language. Later you can translate each response from the skill language back to the customer's local language.

This approach simplifies the process of authoring and maintaining the conversational skill. You can build one skill and use it for all languages. However, the intention and meaning of the customer message can be lost in the translation.

For more information about webhooks you can use for translation, see [Webhook overview](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant?topic=assistant-webhook-overview).
* Most precise solution: If you have the time and resources, the best user experience can be achieved when you build multiple conversational skills, one for each language that you want to support. Watson Assistant has built-in support for all languages. Use one of 13 language-specific models or the universal model, which adapts to any other language you want to support.

When you build a skill that is dedicated to a language, a language-specific classifier model is used by the skill. The precision of the model means that your assistant can better understand and recognize the goals of even the most colloquial message from a customer.

Use the new universal language model to create an assistant that is fluent even in languages that Watson Assistant doesn't support with built-in models.

To deploy, attach each language skill to its own assistant that you can deploy in a way that optimizes its use by your target audience.

For example, use the web chat integration with your French-speaking assistant to deploy to a French-language page on your website.
You might want to download a skill if you want to use the same dialog skill in a different instance of the Watson Assistant service, for example. You can download it from one instance and import it to another instance as a new dialog skill.

To download a dialog skill, complete the following steps:



1. Find the dialog skill tile on the Skills page or on the configuration page of an assistant that uses the skill.
2. Click the ![open and close list of options](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs-content/v1/content/a2b18c153837bce00a5b4de496e4b4ca64bbf56e/assistant-data/images/kabob-beta.png) icon, and then choose Export.

v1.3: Choose Download JSON.
3. Specify a name for the JSON file and where to save it, and then click Save.



You can export a skill by using the API also. Include the export=true parameter with the request. See the [API reference](https://cloud.ibm.com/apidocs/assistant/assistant-data-v1getworkspace) for more details.
After you identify the list of steps, you can then focus on writing engaging content to turn each interaction into a positive experience for your customer.

Date and time response types
: New to action skills, these response types allow you to collect date and time information from customers as they answer questions or make requests.

New built-in variables
: Two kinds of built-in variables are now available for action skills.



* Set by assistant variables include the common and essential variables Now, Current time, and Current date.
* Set by integration variables are Timezone and Locale and are available to use when connected to a webhook or integration.



Universal language model now generally available
: You now can build an assistant in any language you want to support. If a dedicated language model is not available for your target language, create a skill that uses the universal language model. The universal model applies a set of shared linguistic characteristics and rules from multiple languages as a starting point. It then learns from training data written in the target language that you add to it. For more information, see [Understanding the universal language model](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant?topic=assistant-assistant-languageassistant-language-universal).





 3 June 2021 

Log webhook support for actions and search skills
: The log webhook now supports messages exchanged with actions skills and search skills, in addition to dialog skills. For more information, see [Logging activity with a webhook](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant?topic=assistant-webhook-log).





 27 May 2021 

Change to conversation skill choices
: When adding skills to new or existing assistant, the conversation skill choices have been combined, so that you pick from either an actions skill or a dialog skill.

With this change:



* New assistants can use up to two skills, either actions and search or dialog and search. Previously, new assistants could use up to three skills: actions, dialog, and search.
* Existing assistants that already use an actions skill and a dialog skill together can continue to use both.
* The ability to use actions and dialog skills together in a new assistant is planned for 2H 2021.







 20 May 2021
: These beta SMS and voice capabilities are now available from service instances that are hosted in Seoul, Tokyo, London, and Sydney.

Improved JSON editor
: The JSON editor in the dialog skill was updated. The editor now uses JSON syntax highlighting and allows you to expand and collapse objects.

Connect to agent from actions skill
: The actions skill now supports transferring a customer to an agent from within an action step.





 4 December 2020 

Introducing more service desk options for web chat
: When you deploy your assistant by using the web chat integration, there are now reference implementations that you can use for the following service desks:



* Twilio Flex
* Genesys Cloud



Alternatively, you can bring your own service desk by using the service desk extension starter kit.

For more information, see [Adding service desk support](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant?topic=assistant-deploy-web-chatdeploy-web-chat-haa).

Autolearning has been moved and improved
: Go to the Analytics>Autolearning page to enable the feature and see visualizations that illustrate how autolearning impacts your assistant's performance over time. For more information, see [Empower your skill to learn automatically](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant?topic=assistant-autolearn).

Search from actions skill
: The actions skill now supports triggering a search that uses your associated search skill from within an action step.

System entities language support change
: The new system entities are now used by all skills except Korean-language dialog skills. If you have a Korean skill that uses the older version of the system entities, update it. The legacy version will stop being supported for Korean skills in March 2021. For more information, see [Legacy system entities](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant?topic=assistant-legacy-system-entities).

Disambiguation selection enhancement
: When a customer chooses an option from a disambiguation list, the corresponding intent is submitted. With this latest release, a confidence score of 1.0 is assigned to the intent.
Support for every language!
: You now can build an assistant in any language you want to support. If a dedicated language model is not available for your target language, create a skill that uses the universal language model. The universal model applies a set of shared linguistic characteristics and rules from multiple languages as a starting point. It then learns from training data written in the target language that you add to it.

The universal model is available as a beta feature. For more information, see [Understanding the universal language model](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant?topic=assistant-assistant-languageassistant-language-universal).

Actions skill improvement
: Now you can indicate whether or not to ask for a number when you apply a number reply constraint to a step. Test how changes to this setting might help speed up a customer's interaction. Under the right circumstances, it can be useful to let a number mention be recognized and stored without having to explicitly ask the customer for it.





 1 March 2021 

Introducing the Enterprise plan!
: The Enterprise plan includes all of the market differentiating features of the Plus plan, but with higher capacity limits, additional security features, custom onboarding support to get you going, and a lower overall cost at higher volumes.

To have a dedicated environment provisioned for your business, request the Enterprise with Data Isolation plan. To submit a request online, go to [http://ibm.biz/contact-wa-enterprise](http://ibm.biz/contact-wa-enterprise).

The Enterprise plan is replacing the Premium plan. The Premium plan is being retired today. Existing Premium plan users are not impacted. They can continue to work in their Premium instances and create instances up to the 30-instance limit. New users do not see the Premium plan as an option when they create a service instance.

For more information, see the [Pricing](https://www.ibm.com/cloud/watson-assistant/pricing/) page.

Other plan changes
: Our pricing has been revised to reflect the features we've added that help you build an assistant that functions as a powerful omnichannel SaaS application.
With this change:



* New assistants can use up to two skills, either actions and search or dialog and search. Previously, new assistants could use up to three skills: actions, dialog, and search.
* Existing assistants that already use an actions skill and a dialog skill together can continue to use both.
* The ability to use actions and dialog skills together in a new assistant is planned for 2H 2021.







 20 May 2021 

Actions skill improvement
: Actions now include a new choice, Go to another action, for what to do next in a step. Also called a subaction, this feature lets you can call one action from another action, to switch the conversation flow to another action to perform a certain task. If you have a portion of an action that can be applied across multiple use cases you can build it once and call to it from each action. This new option is available in the And then section of each step.





 21 April 2021 

Preview button for testing your assistant
: For testing your assistant, the new Preview button replaces the previous Preview tile in Integrations.

New checklist with steps to go live
: Each assistant includes a checklist that you can use to ensure you're ready to go live.

Actions skill improvement
: Actions now include currency and percentage response types.

Learn what's new
: The What's new choice on the help menu opens a list of highlighting recent features.





 14 April 2021 

Actions skill improvement
: Actions now include a free text response type, allowing you to capture special instructions or requests that a customer wants to pass along.





 8 April 2021 

Deploy your assistant to WhatsApp - now generally available
: Make your assistant available through Whatsapp messaging so it can exchange messages with your customers where they are. This integration, which is now generally available, creates a connection between your assistant and WhatsApp by using Twilio as a provider. For more information, see [Integrating with WhatsApp](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant?topic=assistant-deploy-whatsapp).

Web chat home screen now generally available
: Ease your customers into the conversation by adding a home screen to your web chat window.
It is enabled automatically for new English-language dialog skills.







 26 July 2019 

Missing skills issue is resolved
: In some cases, workspaces that were created through the API only were not being displayed when you opened the Watson Assistant user interface. This issue has been addressed. All workspaces that you create by using the API are displayed as dialog skills when you open the user interface.





 23 July 2019 

Dialog search is fixed
: In some skills, the search function was not working in the Dialog page. The issue is now fixed.





 17 July 2019 

Disambiguation choice limit
: You can now set the maximum number of options to show to users when the assistant asks them to clarify what they want to do. For more information about disambiguation, see [Disambiguation](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant?topic=assistant-dialog-runtimedialog-runtime-disambiguation).

Dialog search issue
: In some skills, the search function is not working in the Dialog page. A new user interface library, which increases the page responsiveness, is being rolled out to existing service instances in phases. This search issue affects only dialog skills for which the new library is not yet enabled.

Missing skills issue
: In some cases, workspaces that were created through the API only are not being displayed when you open the Watson Assistant user interface. Normally, these workspaces are displayed as dialog skills. If you do not see your skills from the UI, don't worry; they are not gone. Contact support to report the issue, so the team can enable the workspaces to be displayed properly.





 15 July 2019 

Numeric system entities upgrade available in Dallas
: The new system entities are now also available as a beta feature for instances that are hosted in Dallas. See [New system entities](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant?topic=assistant-system-entities)





 12 June 2019 

Numeric system entities upgrade
: New system entities are available as a beta feature that you can enable in dialog skills that are written in English or German.
Click Add existing skill.

Click the skill that you want to add from the available skills that are displayed.



After you add a search skill to an assistant, it is automatically enabled for the assistant as follows:



* If the assistant has only a search skill, any user input that is submitted to one of the assistant's integration channels triggers the search skill.
* If the assistant has both a dialog skill and a search skill, any user input triggers the dialog skill first. The dialog addresses any user input that it has a high confidence it can answer correctly. You can configure the dialog such that any queries that would normally trigger the anything_else node in the dialog tree are sent to the search skill instead. To do so, add a search skill response type to the Anything else node.

You can prevent the search from being triggered from the anything_else node by following the steps in [Disabling search](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant-data?topic=assistant-data-skill-search-addsearch-skill-add-disable).
* If you want a specific search query to be triggered for specific questions, add a search skill response type to the appropriate dialog node. See [Responses](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant-data?topic=assistant-data-dialog-overviewdialog-overview-multimedia) for more details.









 Search triggers 

The search skill is triggered in the following ways:



* Anything else node: Searches an external data source for a relevant answer when none of the dialog nodes can address the user's query.

Instead of showing a standard message, such as I don't know how to help you with that. the assistant can say, Maybe this information can help: followed by the passage returned by the search. If a search skill is linked to your assistant, then whenever the anything_else node is triggered, rather than displaying the node response, you can set it up to trigger a search instead. The assistant passes the user input as the query to your search skill, and returns the search results as the response.