Auraline communication protocol

Introduction

Aura Platform Team has developed a new communication protocol named Auraline. This is a proprietary protocol, developed and exclusively owned by Aura Platform Team for facilitating communication between channels and Aura. Auraline is based on Microsoft Direct Line and can be considered as a local implementation of the Microsoft protocol, eliminating dependencies on Microsoft Azure Bot Service.

This particularity provides significant advantages, including cost saving, higher flexibility and the ability to plan future developments according to our specific needs. Additionally, it enables us to address new backend-to-backend scenarios, such as managing a channels aggregator system or responding across multiple channels or applications instead of a single one.

Auraline facilitates the process for integrating new channels into the communication framework. Moreover, it enables an easy transition for channels that are currently integrated into Direct Line, minimizing disruptions and maximizing interoperability.

Auraline uses Aura request-response semantic model v3, implemented by the normalized version of the property channelData v3.

Communication protocol

Auraline facilitates the communication of a channel with aura-bridge and aura-groot, consequently establishing a connection with the skills connected to aura-groot. To enable this communication, specific plugins and swaggers are developed in aura-bridge to support this protocol.

Given its foundation on the Microsoft Direct Line protocol, Auraline adopts the Direct Line JSON format and integrates the same basic processes as those in Microsoft framework:

• Management of conversations and token

  • Creation of a conversation: It provides back a conversationId and a token.
  • Refreshing of non-expired tokens

• Management of sent and received messages

  • Sending messages from users to the bot, utilizing the conversationId and the token.
  • Sending messages from the bot to users, through the publication by the channel of a callback where these messages are received.
  • Sending status of messages to notify the correct reception by the user or an error status.

As previously mentioned, Auraline relies on our request-response semantic model v3. The communication between aura-groot and aura-bridge will always use the single message response format in order to simplify the integration and ensure the orderly delivery of responses to the users.

Responses between aura-bridge and the channel will include an array of activities in a unique answer for each message, that will be orderly delivered to the channel.

The following figure shows the sequence diagram of Auraline communication protocol:

Specific scenario for the use of Auraline communication protocol: CCaaS

The development of Auraline communication protocol is initially aimed at resolving the scenario in which different channels are grouped together in a CCaaS (call-center as a service) that acts as a channel concentrator.

This scenario is schematically shown in the following figure: