Robotic process automation (RPA) is a software technology that makes it easy to build, deploy, and manage software robots that emulate human actions interacting with digital systems and software. Just like people, software robots can do things like understanding what’s on a screen, complete the right keystrokes, navigate systems, identify and extract data, and perform a wide range of defined actions.
RPA processes are widely used for the configuration of task automation. This technology is essential for the automation of repetitive back-office processes. There are numerous RPA tools available in the market and choosing one could be a challenge. In this blog, we will learn how to create a chatbot web application using different RPA tools.
Why We Need RPA Tools
RPA tools aren’t replacements for the underlying business applications, they simply automate the manual tasks of human workers. They essentially look at the screens that regular workers look at to fill in and update the same boxes and fields within the user interface (UI) by pulling the right data from the relevant location. This serves a couple of purposes:
- It frees humans from monotonous, low-value-add tasks like data entry and makes them available for higher-value tasks that require human creativity, ingenuity, and decision making
- It helps to ensure that outputs are complete, correct, and consistent between tasks and between human workers
- It helps to ensure that tasks can be completed more quickly because the robotic process automation tool can find and retrieve any necessary data in the background
Different RPA Tools
OutSystems is the most complete full-stack application development platform. It quickly creates mobile and web applications, chatbots, and reactive web apps for any device. You can build your data models, workflows, logic, pixel-perfect UI, and interactions, and allows you to add your custom code.
This tool makes it very easy to create a mobile or web application.
The implementation requires an Integration Development Environment (IDE), which is used to develop the application known as a service portal. You can get the service portal by creating a free account from OutSystem portal. The IDE will look like this:
First, click on “install application.” It will prompt you to another window that will ask you to choose if you have a reactive web application, tablet application, or mobile application. Then, there will be an additional window that informs and allows you to choose if you’re creating a responsive web application, tablet application, or mobile application.
Then we select the “reactive web application.” It will prompt you to provide a unique name to your application. Then click the “create button” option.
Next, you have to name your RPA module. Creating your module helps develop your web app. Click “create module,” and it’ll redirect you to your main explorer.
In the main menu, you’ll find files of required modules. You can then add in any page or custom module from this menu in the screenshot below:
As we create the chatbot web application, we also will need to include a home screen. We’ll create the home screen for our app, then specify the script module by right-clicking on the “main view” module.
Select “empty” in the dialog box, then click on it. You will find the basic workflow of your application below. It’s important to note that to run our chatbot application, we will need an event to occur. We would select the “OnReady” event in the home screen module.
Once we add our custom JavaScript language, we’ll click on the green icon located in the middle corner of the ide to save and publish. Once the app is published, it will direct you to the browser to have the first look at our simple chatbot application.
Pega is a tool for managing business processes. It’s suitable for use on desktop servers and solely offers cloud-based services or solutions. It’s compatible with Windows, Linux, and Mac. This program is ideal for medium and big companies.
It has an event-driven approach, which works based on a user-defined event so that it works faster. It’s a robust and reliable tool, which has been used by many organizations having the need for an RPA.
We’ll also try to create a simple chatbot using Pega:
To create the chatbot using the Pega RPA tool, we need to install the Pega Dev studio to create the chatbot application. The dev studio will look like this:
We will try to create a “case creation” chatbot, which creates the case, or service ticket, when chatting with an end-user, meaning, you would need to specify the case details in the request and response architecture.
Click on the “web chatbot” button. It will prompt you to the next dialogue box, which allows us to specify the name of our chatbot channel as well as the request and response command.
In the above screenshot, we have specified the name of the chatbot channel and request command, which will then request the entity to provide basic information, which we need to create the case.
In the “response view,” you’ll find two commands that were already created like “hi” and “cancel,” which are considered as default commands for our chatbot. For our chatbot to work properly, work we need to create the workflow of our chatbot and specify the workflow which can be configured inside the chatbot tab in the dev studio.
We can provide the basic rule sets with automation with the help of flowcharts.
Now our chatbot is ready to test. We can find the runtime scenario of our chatbot in the preview tab in the right corner of the dev studio inside our channel explorer.
IBM Watson RPA provides all core capabilities. IBM Watson can easily be used as your web application automation tool. It can work on any platform with any application. You need to have programming skills to use this tool, but it is user-friendly for developers. This tool is perfect for medium and large organizations.
Some of its features include:
- Supports a multi-environment deployment model
- Security provided for network and software credentials
- It can be used on any platform
- Can work for any application
- It’s provided by IBM Cloud
We’ll also try to create a simple chatbot using IBM Watson.
First, log in to IBM Cloud. Search for Watson Assistance. Then, add your workspace and provide the name for our workspace, such as how the chatbot looks like below.
Now, we need to train Watson for our chatbox customization. Once we created the workspace, we’ll be redirected to a window that will say, “add intents.” We’ll now see the chatbot in the left corner of the window, which will help us configure our request and the corresponding response. In the screenshot below, we’ll configure hello as the request and hello as the corresponding response. Our IBM Watson chatbot will implement in a few short minutes. This specific technique saves time and is very resourceful to use.
RPA Tools Are Easy to Use
RPA tools are popular in today’s market and are incredibly helpful when building additional application integrations into our typical web apps. For more information on how you can utilize these tools, contact our experts today.
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