Aura – Aura Virtual Assistant

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Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction to Aura Virtual Assistant

Discover in this document the fundamentals and advantages of Aura Virtual Assistant

What is Aura Virtual Assistant?

Aura Virtual Assistant is the new relationship with our clients. A cutting-edge digital assistant accessible through different channels, brands and devices, that understands our customers’ needs expressed in natural language and offers personalized responses in real time.

Figure 1. Aura Virtual Assistant

Aura Virtual Assistant is able to:

Talk and establish conversations with the users, as it is based on a conversational design to provide a natural experience through several channels and using different brands
Understand and recognize the user’s requests: Leveraging Cognitive Services, Aura Virtual Assistant offers natural language processing capabilities for an accurate communication with the customers, depending on channel capabilities and usability criteria.
Resolve: Aura Virtual Assistant builds the logic of different types of experiences and provides precise answers to our customers in real time.

Key Aura Virtual Assistant features

Aura Virtual Assistant is designed as a distributed ecosystem, within an architecture evolution at the forefront of the latest advances in software architecture.

In this framework, it is conceived as a multi-bot system based on Microsoft skills architecture, that offers the following capabilities:

Aura Virtual Assistant is:

Multichannel, as it can be integrated into different channels, both third-party and Telefónica ones.

Multibrand, as within an OB, it can be accessible through diverse brands, each of them with different channels and use cases

Multi-communication mode, allowing text, voice or tap-based interaction through different devices.

It enables and accelerates the creation and integration of skills-bots across channels, for Telefónica users to manage their digital services and deliver rich experiences, while ensuring data privacy and security.

It has a specific personality and tone, consistent through channels.

It includes a set of use cases and prebuilt bots (as the video one).

It offers a series of capabilities and tools to create locally relevant experiences for the user.

It enables the connection with ATRIA for leveraging cutting-edge AI capabilities.

It broadens the spectrum of technologies that can be connected to Aura.

Aura Virtual Assistant functional overview

The following diagram shows how Aura Virtual Assistant operates and its communication flow at a high level:

Figure 2. Aura Virtual Assistant functional overview

The user accesses Aura through one of the brands through which the OB commercializes its services.
The user sends a request to Aura through a specific channel available for the selected brand, which is the communication mean a Telefónica client must use to interact with Aura.
Then, Aura Root component, which is the core block of Aura Virtual Assistant functionalities, receives the request and redirects it to the best skill to answer it.
This skill, which is a bot with specific expertise and features, understands the request and resolves it. If required, it retrieves data from Kernel.
Aura Root provides the response back to the user through the intended channel.

Discover more details of Aura Virtual Assistant functional operation and its functional components in the document Aura Virtual Assistant functional description.

Are you a highly-skilled technician? Access here technical documents related to Aura Virtual Assistant:

Benefits from using Aura Virtual Assistant

Benefits for Aura end-users

Key advantages	Enhancements for Aura
Easier relationship	Aura Virtual Assistant enhances customer relationships and improves business automation, efficiency, and transversal intelligence within the digital ecosystem.
Improved user’s experience	Aura can easily integrate cutting-edge AI technologies to improve Aura capabilities, thus offering a wider range of experiences together with more accurate and enriched responses to the users, while ensuring data privacy and security.
Consistency	The user will always have the same experience regardless of the channel she is using, as there will not be different use cases depending on the channel
Ready for future challenges	The quick and easy integration of technologies broadens the capabilities of Aura, that can take advantage of state-of-the-art solutions from different partners to be connected to Aura

Benefits for Aura IT Teams

Key advantages	Enhancements for Aura
Efficiency	Multibot architecture can perform tasks more efficiently due to the skills isolation. Each skill can be deployed and work independently, leading to better overall performance and resources utilization.
Scalability and flexibility	The separation of Aura functionalities (logic, training, routing, deployment, etc.) allows a cost and time-effective strategy for extending Aura capabilities without affecting other components
Autonomy	The new architecture allows an easy integration of multivendor development tools (such as Microsoft Composer, Teneo), third-party bots or innovative cognitive components (for example, KSolr, MSFT Language Studio, Azure OpenAI models).
Deployment simplification	The separation of Aura into different functional blocks and the skills isolation facilitate the installation, as only the specific component/feature to be deployed is affected, without the need for global re-deployments
Resilience	Multibot architecture improves fault-tolerance. If a single component fails, the whole system can continue functioning
Enrichment mechanisms	Aura can incorporate tools able to add additional information both to the user’s request (better resolution) and to the response (relevant information for the user) through the integration of Advanced Analytics Models (AAMs) and contextual information

Docs:

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Aura Virtual Assistant functional description

Discover in this document the fundamentals of Aura Virtual Assistant architecture from a functional point of view and a high-level overview of its main components

Foundation: Microsoft skills architecture

Aura architecture is conceived as a multi-bot system based on Microsoft Bot Framework skills architecture.

In this framework, the architecture is composed of a root bot, that can call one or more skill bots, which are specific to a knowledge area or topic.

The user interacts directly with the root bot, and it delegates the conversational logic to a skill to provide the user with the intended service or response.

Figure 3. Microsoft skills

Access Microsoft Skills documentation.

Aura Assistant functional overview

Starting from the functional overview flowchart (Figure 2), the current section zooms in and shows a deeper detail of the functional operation of Aura Virtual Assistant.

Figure 4. Aura Virtual Assistant functional operation

The user accesses a specific Telefónica brand and sends a request to Aura through a channel.
The channel connects to Aura Root.
Two scenarios arise here:
- If the channel “speaks” a language Aura understands, that is, it supports Direct Line protocol: direct connection.
- If the channel “does not speak” a language Aura understands: the incoming request must be converted into a standard Aura message through an adapter.
Aura Root makes the decision about what is the best skill (bot) to answer the user’s request in a routing component.
Optionally, it is possible to add additional information to the request through an enrichment module, with data coming from Aura context, algorithms, analytical models, insights, etc.
Aura Root sends the request to a specific skill, depending on the selected domain.
The specific skill (domain-bot) routed by Aura Root receives the request and handles it. At this stage, two scenarios can arise:
- 6.a. The skill receives the request in Direct Line format.
- 6.b. If the routed bot is not part of the Microsoft ecosystem (third-party bots), the request must be transformed through a third-party adapter to be understood by the bot (and the other way around with answers).
  Strictly speaking these adapters are not part of Aura Root and could be integrated through different strategies by the OBs. For instance, the conversion could be performed in a specific skill connected to the third-party bot.
The skill calls NLP as a Service capability in ATRIA for the recognition of the user’s intention and entities.
- Currently, aura-bot as a skill works as in the previous architecture, calling Aura NLP for recognition purposes.
The response to the user’s request is built and sent back to Aura Root.
Aura Root provides the answer back to the channel. If required, the channel adapter converts again the Aura message to the format compatible with the channel.

Take into account that the current document only shows a functional representation in order to make the new architecture more understandable for readers. The underlying technical components and processes are explained in the documents:

Docs:

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Aura Virtual Assistant development architecture and operation

Documents from this point forward contain low-level technical information regarding Aura Virtual Assistant, aimed at technical profiles.

We highly recommend reading these basic Aura Virtual Assistant documents first to have a clear overview of its foundation, benefits and functional behavior:

Introduction

Aura Virtual Assistant architecture is conceived as a multi-bot system based on Microsoft skills architecture.

In this framework, Aura is divided into isolated modules (skill-based bots) that, currently, are independent domain bots able to provide a specific function or capability in a coordinated and efficient manner.

These self-supported skills work with an orchestrator at the top, responsible for connecting channels with bots and managing the conversational flow with the customer.

Mapping functional architecture with development architecture

As explained before, Aura Virtual Assistant documentation contains both:

Low-level technical documents, aimed at not-technical profiles, that describe the functional behavior of our assistant
High-level technical documents, for highly-skilled technical profiles, that include detailed technical information, system architecture and technical processes

In order to ease comprehension for readers, take as a basis the Aura Virtual Assistant functional flowchart and check the mapping between functional and technical components.

Functional component	Technical component
Channel	Channel
Aura Root	Routing module	aura-groot
Channel adapter	aura-bridge
Skill	Skill

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Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Aura Virtual Assistant technical components

Find here a detailed technical description of Aura Virtual Assistant components.

Some of them are shared between Aura Virtual Assistant and ATRIA, as indicated in their corresponding documents.

Index

Aura Virtual Assistant components

Aura Groot
Aura Bot skill
Aura Bridge
Aura Global use cases
Request-response model
Aura Authentication API
Aura File Manager
Complex Logic Framework
Redis Mongo Synchronizer
Aura microfrontend base

Cross-platform components
(Components shared between Aura Virtual Assistant and ATRIA)

Aura NLP
Aura Channels
Aura Configuration API
Aura KPIs entities
Aura APIs documentation

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Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Aura Virtual Assistant technical guidelines

Guidelines detailing specific technical processes for different technical profiles (DevOps, use case builders, NLP experts, linguists, etc.) who want to work with Aura Virtual Assistant

Introduction

Deploy Aura Virtual Assistant

Engineering teams, DevOps teams
Key documents and guidelines for the deployment of Aura Virtual Assistant (Common for ATRIA deployment)

Deployment Task Center

Develop and operate Aura Virtual Assistant

Engineering teams, Operation teams, Aura Developers
Guidelines for development, operation, testing and monitoring

Developers Workspace

Docs:

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Experiences Builder

Guidelines and resources for the development of use case in Aura Virtual Assistant, using our conversational bot

Certain guidelines are also suitable for building experiences in ATRIA