Getting started with the legacy chat

Before you begin

The legacy chat is a direct-action chat, with which you can initiate a pre-defined sequence of actions without engaging in a lengthy conversation. This approach is ideal for automating tasks and helping ensure immediate execution with minimal interaction.

If you prefer a more interactive and conversational approach for running your tasks, you can opt to use the AI chat. This chat interface allows you to engage in a multi-turn conversation with the AI, seeking guidance and assistance for your tasks. See more information in Getting started with the AI chat.

The following procedure provides the basic high-level steps to work with the legacy chat of watsonx Orchestrate. By following these steps, you should get a better understanding on how to work with the legacy chat and additional workflows you can use.

1. Run skills to automate tasks
2. Optional: Create AI assistants

Run skills to automate tasks

Skills are automation capabilities that enable you to automate tasks. You use skills by running them through the legacy chat. Before you can run skills, you must have them in a skill set. The following procedure describes that end-to-end workflow to run skills on the legacy chat:

1. Identify skills in the catalog that you want to use to automate tasks

   The skill catalog lists a variety of skills depending on the skill set that you selected. On the legacy chat, you have access to your personal skill set and team skill sets that admins make available to you. Select the one that is suitable.

   The skill catalog has over 1000 prebuilt skills that you can use. You should also note that custom skills built by builders also appear there.

   You must identify the tasks of your work that you want to automate and find the skills that support automating them. If needed, you can have builders build more skills to better support your work.

2. Optional: Build skills

   It is possible that you and your team identifies that you need specific skills to automate particular tasks or process of your work and business, and the skills available do not match your requirements. Users of watsonx Orchestrate with builder role can add more skills to the skill catalog by building them on Skill studio.

   Skill studio enables builders to create skills of various types, including: decision models, workflows, generative AI answers, connectors to application programming interfaces (API) through OpenAPI specifications, and flows that combine existing prebuilt or custom skills. With these skills, builders can automate tasks and processes with varying complexities.

   Skills become available to users on the skill catalog after builders build, enhance, and publish them.

3. Connect to the app of skills

   Some skills require a connection to third-party applications. If you are on your personal skill set, you can connect to the app with your credentials. Skills in team skill sets require that an admin connects to the application with a shared credential before you can run them.

4. Run skills on the legacy chat

   Run skills by either clicking the tile of the skill that appears on the legacy chat interface or by sending a message in the chat to trigger it to run the skill. If you are not connected to the app of the skill you are trying to run, the chat prompts you to connect with your credentials.

Optional: Creating AI assistants

AI assistants enable conversational experiences with the power of generative AI through large language models (LLM). They can respond through your queries and, through actions, automate tasks of your work, simple to complex. Builders can use different types of actions, like AI-guided actions, skill-based actions, or completely custom-built actions, to create complex workflows for varying scenarios.

See the steps to create AI assistants:

1. Create AI assistants

   Use the AI assistant builder to create AI assistants. To create one, do the following steps:

   1. Connect to the app of skills on the skill sets of the AI assistant

      Each environment of an AI assistant is linked to a skill set. By default, AI assistants start with two environments: Draft and Live, thus, also starting with two skill setss, for example, My_Assistant_Draft and My_Assistant_Live. Users with administrator role must connect to the apps of all skills that builders want to add to AI assistants by navigating to the Team skill sets on the Manage team page or by navigating to the skill sets page if on a watsonx Orchestrate provisioned on IBM Cloud. Administrators must connect with shared credentials.

   2. Add actions to an AI assistant

      Builders enhance AI assistant with actions to enable them to do complex activities, thus automating tasks and processes. Available actions include AI-guided actions, skill-based actions, or custom-built actions.

   3. Publish AI assistants

      When done, builders need to publish the AI assistants so that admins can add them to the AI chat.

   4. Connect AI assistants to the AI chat

      Admins must connect AI assistants to the AI chat so users can use their capabilities. Add AI assistants to the AI chat on the AI agent configuration page.

Deepen your knowledge

Improve your knowledge by exploring the following topics that go deeper on the IBM watsonx Orchestrate experience.

• Building skills in Skill studio

  Learn how to use Skill studio to build powerful skills to automate your work. You can create projects that have decisions models, workflows, or generative AI, and publish them as skills for your team. Also, you can create skills from OpenAPI specification files, discover skills from additional IBM or third-party products, or combine skills to build skill flows.

• Building AI assistants in AI assistant builder

  Learn how to create AI assistants on AI assistant builder to deploy engaging conversational experiences either on the AI chat of watsonx Orchestrate or embedded on third-party applications.

• Using the legacy chat

  Learn more about how to connect the apps and use the skills in the legacy chat by exploring all of its components and details.