Ida 26.03 is the first baseline release of Ida.Next. It brings a complete chat experience to customer sites, reusable bot capabilities, and deeper connections to PeopleSoft and Salesforce. This release also adds stronger privacy controls and clearer tools for understanding how Ida is being used.
Highlights
A chat experience that fits your site
Ida can now appear as a floating chat window, inside a page, or in a side panel. Teams can choose the layout that fits their site and use a visual builder to create the embed snippet. For the person chatting, replies stream in as they are written, and guided prompts make it easier to choose an option, pick a date, or confirm an action. Ida can recover from an interrupted connection, resume a conversation, and handle sign-in when a tool needs it.
Skills you can build once and use across bots
A skill brings together instructions, tools, knowledge, and settings for a particular job. Teams can create and version a skill, install it for a unit, and assign it to the bots that need it. Ida brings the skill into a conversation when it is useful, instead of loading every capability into every chat. Skills can be updated, exported, imported, and adapted for another client or bot. That means less repeated setup when a useful capability needs to reach more people.
Signature Integrations for PeopleSoft and Salesforce
PeopleSoft and Salesforce are Signature Integrations, reaching beyond a simple API connection. They include configuration and embedded experiences inside the source systems, ways to pass identity and entitlements to Ida, and authentication flows for connected tools. PeopleSoft can host a tool catalog and use its existing sign-in for Ida administration and tool use. The Salesforce package connects Ida to Salesforce knowledge and can carry entitlements from another system so Ida applies the right access rules. The result is an assistant that can work within the systems people already use.
More visibility and control for admins
Conversation Tracer lets admins test a bot and see the knowledge and tools behind its answer without changing the live bot. New reports and trend views help teams understand use, feedback, and cost. Administrators can also move configuration between environments and set per-bot rules that remove personal information before it reaches an AI model, then restore it in Ida’s reply.
Full Release
Enhancements
- Flexible chat placement: Choose a floating widget, an embedded chat, or a side panel. A visual embed builder produces the snippet for the chosen layout.
- Smoother conversations: Streaming replies, connection recovery, conversation resume, a welcome message, and clearer tool activity make chats easier to follow.
- Guided interactions: Ida can ask for a choice, date, or confirmation in a structured prompt. The widget also supports consent, persona selection, feedback, and transcript download.
- Sign-in when needed: Ida can guide someone through sign-in before or during a conversation and continue when authentication is complete.
- More chat controls: An expandable chat window, draggable launcher, improved styling and avatars, better keyboard behavior, and a focused message box make the widget easier to use.
- Reusable Skills: Create, publish, and version skills that combine instructions, tools, knowledge, and settings. Install them for units and assign them to bots.
- Skill delivery and updates: Export or import a skill package, upgrade an installation, fork a skill, create one from an existing bot, and use container-based tools within a skill.
- Simpler tool setup: Search and filter tools in one grid, make bulk bot assignments, see sign-in requirements, and open tool setup from the bot editor.
- Knowledge Ingestion API: External systems can push documents to Ida through a managed process, with credentials, processing, and admin setup.
- More precise knowledge access: Persona-based retrieval and multiple audience scopes let one document serve the right people without making separate copies.
- Better knowledge processing: Website extraction and document chunking have been improved. Uploaded files move to object storage, and website knowledge defaults to a 30-day refresh schedule.
- More AI provider choice: Google Gemini supports chat and embeddings through Google AI Studio and Vertex AI.
- PeopleSoft Signature Integration: PeopleSoft-hosted setup and tool selection, PeopleSoft sign-in, authenticated tool execution, and source-system context connect Ida to the work people do in PeopleSoft.
- Salesforce Signature Integration: Salesforce setup and embedded chat, knowledge integration, and identity and entitlement exchange connect Ida to Salesforce and to access rules from other systems.
- eForms and source-system context: Ida can use context sent by an integrated system to tailor an assistant’s knowledge and conversation.
- Conversation Log and reports: Search conversations, filter by date and feedback, view transcripts, and export usage, feedback, source, and cost reports to CSV.
- Analytics and cost detail: Trend views, monthly usage summaries, engaged-conversation counts, and cost per conversation help teams see how Ida is being used.
- Conversation Tracer: Test a bot with temporary settings and inspect model, tool, and knowledge-search activity without changing the live configuration.
- Environment migration: Export and import configuration between environments, use reusable presets, and review migration runs in the admin console.
- Privacy controls: Per-bot rules can detect and remove personal information from user input and tool results before they reach an AI model, then restore it in the response.
- Security and reliability: Stronger tenant boundaries, sign-in checks, secret handling, crawler safeguards, automated tests, and release checks support safer operation.
- Admin console polish: Clearer labels, navigation, role guidance, audit details, provider settings, and bot and knowledge forms reduce day-to-day friction.
- Operational controls: Announce an outage, pause an individual bot or a group of bots, and help users escalate when Ida cannot resolve a request.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed an issue that could leave search data behind after a knowledge definition was deleted.
- Fixed an update that could reset website knowledge settings when only some fields were changed.
- Fixed chat formatting that could show Markdown as raw text.
- Fixed cases where wide chat content or charts caused unwanted scrolling or layout changes.
- Fixed a Tracer error that could leave the assistant response loading indefinitely.
- Fixed a migration issue that prevented an emptied bot collection from updating the target environment.
- Fixed several smaller console, tool-assignment, and widget layout issues.
Thank you for the feedback that helped shape this release.
Until next time,
The Ida Team
