What's new in IBM® watsonx Orchestrate®

As new features and capabilities are added to IBM watsonx Orchestrate for January of 2025, you can read about them here. Refer to Previous releases to learn more about changes that happened in the previous months.

Note: Do you want to get updates on new features, bug fixes, and security fixes for IBM watsonx Orchestrate on-premises? See What's new and changed in IBM watsonx Orchestrate on IBM Cloud Pak for Data and IBM Software Hub documentation.

Important: The What's new documentation is accurate as of the publication date and remains relevant only until the corresponding release. Terminologies and links might change over time, and future updates might not be reflected here.

30 January 2025

The following sections describe changes that happened on the release of 30 January 2025 for IBM watsonx Orchestrate on IBM Cloud® and on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

AI agent available on IBM Cloud

The AI agent is now available on IBM Cloud! Use agents, AI assistants, and skills in the AI chat to assist and augment your team's capabilities with advanced language models, by providing valuable insights and support to help your team achieve their goals.

Explore the features available:

Support for new foundation models

IBM watsonx Orchestrate now supports the following foundation models:

llama-3-2-11b-vision-instruct
llama-3-2-90b-vision-instruct
llama-3-3-70b-instruct

For more information, see Supported foundation models.

Enhanced UI experience for AI agent settings

The AI agent settings page is made more intuitive by simplifying the UI configuration. Instead of using YAMLs, now you have dedicated input fields to configure the base LLM and its parameters. You can specify the format to generate an output response in the System prompt tab.

For more information, see Configuring the model of the AI agent and Setting the system prompt.

Support for handwritten text extraction in IBM Document Processing

You can now perform handwriting recognition in English for the Extract Text skill of the IBM Document Processing app. When you set the language parameter to en_hw, the skill uses a handwriting recognition model that is specialized for English.

The handwritten text extraction improves the accuracy for detecting and extracting handwritten text compared to the standard OCR approach. For best results, use this option especially if your documents contain a significant amount of handwritten text.

For more information, see Skill name: Extract text.

IBM® watsonx Orchestrate® API updates

See the updates in the IBM watsonx Orchestrate API for this release.

Customizing welcome message through API

IBM watsonx Orchestrate added an API to customize the welcome message of AI Agent chat.

For more information about the API, see Get Welcome content Launch icon

Skills and skill sets API for IBM Cloud

You can use API to access skills or skill sets in watsonx Orchestrate on IBM Cloud.

For more information, see Skills Launch icon and skill sets in IBM watsonx Orchestrate API.

Other enhancements and changes

The following table details the enhancements that are delivered in this release and the user role that is affected.

Enhancements	Description	Affected role
General purpose answering (GPA) is disabled by default	GPA is disabled by default for new assistants in assistant builder. This enhancement enables you to make an informed decision, whether to enable GPA or not, based on the content required (preloaded content or general content).	User or WO User Builder or Writer
The field name Action confidence threshold is now updated to Use no matches.	The field name Action confidence threshold under Settings in the Evaluate page is now updated to Use no matches with drop-down values Rarely, Sometimes and More often. This change provides clarity and consistency in field naming.	Builder or Writer
The table displays 10 rows by default	The tables in the chat experience now display 10 rows by default in the full-screen mode. This enhancement enables you to view more data at the same time without scrolling.	User or WO User
New button for Manage documents	In the Document extractor build screen of Skill studio, now you can find a Manage documents button next to the document area. This change brings a better user orientation to add and manage documents.	Builder

The following table details the fixes that are delivered in this release and the user role that is affected:

Bug fixes	Description	Affected role
Japanese translations in the Monitor skills	Fixed an issue where the Monitor skills page had texts that were not translated to Japanese.	User or WO User
Apps in the filter section	Fixed an issue where the users and builders were able to see all the apps in the tenant under the filter section even if it is not added by the admin.	User or WO User Builder or Writer
Logging issues for audit events	Fixed an issue where some of the audit logging events were not logged in AWS S3 and CloudWatch.	Admin
`conversation-controller` is not calling `post_run` webhooks	Fixed an issue where `conversation-controller` is missing an environment variable necessary for webhooks.	Builder or Writer
UI errors in skill flow creation	Fixed an issue where the custom input forms in the skill flow were showing some UI errors; for example, a part of the Delete this input tooltip went outside the screen.	Builder or Writer

Documentation updates

See the updates in the watsonx Orchestrate documentation and other contents for this release.

New sections

The Extending your AI agent with webhooks section gives a detailed information about Postrun webhook and Prerun webhook.
Added information about how to generate the Google API client ID for the apps: Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Google Tasks, and Google Drive.

Updated sections

The Seismic app documentation is now updated to add a section on how to retrieve the bearer token.
The Providing inputs to skills on AI agent chat and Providing inputs to skills on legacy chat documentation are now updated to explain how to interact with each field types.
The Wrapping schemas for workflow skills are now updated to add information about x-ibm-parameter-wrapper and x-ibm-response-wrapper.
The Known issues and limitations topic now has the following entries:
- Chat
  - Switching from chat version
  - Using skill-based actions through AI assistants from the AI chat embedded to a page

19 January 2025

The following sections describe changes that happened on the release of 19 January 2025 for IBM watsonx Orchestrate on IBM Cloud® and on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Foundation models not supported

IBM watsonx Orchestrate no longer supports the following foundation models from 19 January 2025:

ibm/granite-13b-chat-v2
meta-llama/llama-3-8b-instruct
meta-llama/llama-3-70b-instruct

For more information, see Supported foundation models.

17 January 2025

The following table details the fixes that are delivered on the release of 17 January 2025 for IBM watsonx Orchestrate on IBM Cloud® and on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the user role that is affected:

Bug fixes	Description	Affected role
The question mark (?) was appended automatically to the user query in conversational search	Fixed an issue where a question mark was appended to the user queries in the conversational search, that impacted the elastic search results.	User or WO User

16 January 2025

The following sections describe changes that happened on the release of 16 January 2025 for IBM watsonx Orchestrate on IBM Cloud® and on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Phone integrations for AI assistants on IBM Cloud®

Integrating phone capabilities into your assistant makes it accessible to customers over the phone. The feature is now available on watsonx Orchestrate for IBM Cloud®.

The phone integration feature enhances your assistant's reach and functionality. It transfers calls to live agents through integrations with contact centers. The options for generating a free phone number, by using an existing number, or connecting through SIP trunks offers flexibility to suit your business needs.

For more information, see Deploying for phone.