Version 2.3

Check out the improvements and enhancements available in the recently released crystal version 2.3:

Advisor

Making crystal conversation smoother

Improvements were made to the core of the crystal experience: conversation.

The highlight is the improvement to disambiguation (when crystal asks for clarification if your question could give multiple results).

For example, say a user has a “Total of Sales” topic and “Average of Sales” topic set up and asked crystal for something general like “sales”. Rather than choose between “Total of Sales” and “Average of Sales” randomly, crystal will now ask the user which one they’d prefer.

Otherwise, various optimizations were made behind the scenes on classification criteria.

This contributes to making crystal’s comprehension and insight-gathering more precise, even when the user asks unspecific questions.

Guiding the user through errors

As the crystal experience gets more complex, errors can happen. The importance is to ensure crystal can tell users what went wrong clearly and guide them to overcoming it. This was a big focus in this release.

A highlight improvement was handling filter errors. A project may have several topics and several filters, but it’s possible not all filters can be applied to all the topics. Before, if you asked to filter a topic by something that isn’t applicable to it, crystal would have simply said “I’m sorry, I don’t understand”.

Now, crystal will explain it isn’t applicable and tell you which filters are, i.e. “The filter you have chosen is not applicable to this topic. Try something else:”

So you can continue the conversation seamlessly, without frustration.

A brand new web app's coming

The new look of crystal’s web app (accessible on desktop) is in the works.

Expect new UI components, interactions and a fresh look & feel. We’re also improving scrollable dialogue, data input, button interactions and much more.

Keep an eye on upcoming releases for more updates!

Console

Enhancements to inviting users to projects

Inviting people to a project just got smoother.

Admins will now be notified when the email was sent successfully to the person they just invited. If the person doesn’t respond, or there’s doubt over whether the invite was sent properly, admins can now send a reminder by clicking on the paper plane icon in the User Management area.

The invitation link will last for 24 hours. Afterwards, it will expire and no longer allow the invited person to access crystal. This link will also be invalidated after the user clicks it and logs in to crystal after creating a password.

If the invited user clicks the link too late (i.e. when it’s invalid), they can click a button to let the admin know they need to be invited again.

This is all to help make the user invitation process faster, easier and more secure.

More personal training

The train step is crucial in the topic creation process. That’s why it's key to ensure an effective user experience while going through it.

The train step has a new design — particularly when admins are creating entities and aliases. Now, admins will see real-time examples of questions they could ask with the entities and aliases they are setting.

So, say you’re creating a “Sales” entity and assigning aliases such as “sold items” to it — you’ll immediately see question examples such as “Show me total of sales” and “Let me see the total of sold items”.

This will help admins ensure the entities and aliases they are setting are on-point and appropriate.

Overall performance and stability improvements

Other improvements were made behind the scenes to increase stability and reduce training times.

Need help using crystal? Check out the full crystal tutorials here.