Publishing an assistant version to the live environment

The act of publishing creates a save-state of your assistant that is called a version. When publishing a new version, the current state of all newly created, edited, or deleted actions and variables is saved. Progressively generating versions of your content allows for smoother handling of change deployments and the ability to revert to previous iterations.

A version can be saved to either a draft or live environment, or saved to the version list to be referenced later. Environments represent separate stages for your assistant’s development lifecycle.

All of the changes made to your assistant so far have been using the draft environment to provide an internal preview of your assistant. It houses all of your in-progress actions that have yet to be published to the live environment. Remember, each environment contains its own content, channels, and extensions.

Your customers interact with assistants on the live environment and cannot interact with assistants on the draft environment. This way, you can build and iterate your content separately from what your customers see.

This tutorial provides an easy-to-follow guide on publishing your first version to the live environment. For a more in-depth overview, the following documentation pages are recommended:

• Environments
• Publishing your content
• Adding and using multiple environments

To see the process, you can watch the following short video.

Prerequisites

To follow this tutorial, you need:

• An IBM Cloud account
• Access to any watsonx Assistant instance on a Lite, Plus Trial, Plus, or Enterprise plan
• An understanding of the watsonx Assistant user interface
• A well-previewed assistant ready for a version to be saved

Estimated time

It should take you approximately 10 minutes to complete the tutorial.

Steps

1. Navigate to the Publish page. You see a list of updates made to your draft environment since your last publish. Because this is the first time that content has been edited in the draft environment, all the updates that are made to the assistant since its creation appear here. If you are ready to save these updates to a version, click Publish.

   

2. The Publish all content window appears. Optionally, you can provide a description of the updates made. On the Publish to an environment drop-down menu, select the Live option. Selecting this option tells watsonx Assistant that you want this version to be saved to the live environment. Click Publish.

   Note: In the future, to create a version without publishing to an environment, select Create version without publishing, and a new version is added to your version list to be referenced later.

   

3. The watsonx Assistant Publish page reappears, this time with no new unpublished changes and a new version on your version list. If you provided a version description, it appears beneath the version number. That’s it. You have successfully published a new version of your assistant to your live environment.

   Your first assistant is almost ready to be deployed, but first, take a moment to learn a bit more about environments. On the navigation page, select Environments.

   

4. The Environments page provides a tab per environment. On each Environments tab, the channels, content, and extensions are displayed. However, there are a few differences between draft and live environments that are illustrated on these tabs that are important to understand as a conversation builder.

   Channels and extensions: Your channels and extensions, such as web chat, phone, and search are configured per environment. When publishing new versions of your content to the live environment, your draft environment’s channel and extension configurations are not published to the live environment. Make and preview updates to your channel or extension configurations in the draft environment. When you have the channel or extension's updated configuration ready in the draft environment, use the same steps to configure the channel or extension for the live environment.

   Content: As covered in Steps 1-3, your actions and variables from the draft environment can be published to your live environment by using versions. When you select Edit content, notice how you return to your Actions tab. Also, notice how you are able to select Preview this environment when viewing the draft environment. This is because the watsonx Assistant preview features are always previewing the changes that you are making to your draft environment in Actions.

   Select the Live tab to switch to the live environment and compare it to the draft environment.

   

5. On the Live tab, notice how the option to Preview this environment does not appear because watsonx Assistant previews only your draft environment. Also, notice how rather than having the ability to edit the content of actions, the equivalent for the live environment is to Switch version. This is because your live environment is always set to the version that you have published to it. As you save more iterations of your content in the future, you are able to revert to any version through the version list.

   

Summary

That’s a wrap on publishing an assistant version to the live environment. Next, you'll set up a channel for your assistant to deploy on. This is one of the fun parts of creating your first assistant. This learning path uses the web chat channel as an example. However, setting up your assistant on a phone or a corporate messaging application is just as easy, and the fundamentals are very similar.

In the next tutorial, you prepare your web chat’s look and feel within the draft environment, make sure it looks good by using the watsonx Assistant Preview feature, then mimic that configuration for your live environment’s web chat.

Any questions? Reach out to Alexander Dfouni.