Version 2.6

The last part of summer brings along the new version of crystal: Version 2.6 is now available.

A lot of work has been done in terms of usability, to guarantee an increasingly smooter User Experience: several behind the scenes improvements are contributing to further raise the quality of our product.

Let’s see in detail what’s on the plate of Version 2.6.

For Members

A member is a user who accesses the advisor and the Dashboard

Disambiguation enhancements

Disambiguation — where crystal will ask for clarification if multiple topics can fit what you’re asking (read more here) — is an powerful feature but, until now, some minor issues could slow its performance.

For example, if the list of terms to disambiguate was particularly long, sometimes crystal would show only a part of the values among which to choose.

With the Version 2.6 enhancement, disambiguation value lists will always be shown completely, allowing members to choose -- among the proposed terms -- the one they need.

Another improvement to this feature concerns the precision with which the disambiguation options are retrieved: with the previous versions it could happen that the options shown were not so close to the input value. For example, if looking for “product: medical supplies”, sometimes the advisor would offer also less specific types of products as an option, such as “cleaning supplies”. With the current enhancement, the advisor will list only results consistent with the search.

Yearly time range specification

When asking crystal “tell me about last year sales”, sometimes there could have been confusion between data related to the last 12 months or to the previous year, January to December period.

To avoid any ambiguity, crystal now specifies with precision that:

• Last year, refers to the whole previous year (e.g. January-December 2020)

• Past year refers to the past 12 months.

Filtering topics by previous periods will be easier and not prone to errors or ambiguities anymore.

For Admins

An admin is a user who can configure crystal in the Self-Service Console

Percentage formatting configuration

Until now, during the topic configuration step, there was only one way to format percentage values and this could result in inconsistencies or incomplete information. Now crystal allows admins to choose between two different logics when formatting their percentage values: by choosing to keep a value as it is in the data source (e.g. 0.523 → 52.3%) or to multiply it by 100% (e.g. 52.3 → 52.3%).

This new logic allows the topics created to always show percentage data correctly.

Topic creation with mandatory filters

As of now, while configuring a topic which included a mandatory filter, sometimes admins could receive a blocking error message during publication. With Version 2.6 this issue was solved and mandatory filters can now be applied without affecting the topic publishing.

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