Overview of apps and skills
Apps and skills are interconnected and help you to accomplish your work. The following topics introduce apps and skills and how you can use them.
Apps
An app is a self-contained software that groups a collection of skills and that skills help you to complete your tasks.
The skill catalog on watsonx Orchestrate contains a list of all the available apps. Although some apps require access to the Standard edition, most of them are accessible to all users.
The skill catalog brings together prebuilt apps and custom apps. Prebuilt apps are the apps that already come with watsonx Orchestrate and custom apps are the apps that are made available by the builder.
In the skill catalog, you can select an app and see all the skills that you can use. The following GIF illustrates selecting an app from the skill catalog and viewing the skills that the app offers:
Skills
On watsonx Orchestrate, skills are made up of one or more related actions. That is, a skill is either one simple action or a collection of actions that together accomplish a task.
For example, adding a row to
an Excel table is an action. It’s a single action that accomplishes a task. The complexity of a skill can range dramatically. A skill can be as simple as a singular action or as elaborate as needed to complete some task.
Let's say that you work in HR and you love interviewing candidates and have a knack for finding talent when one-on-one with a prospective candidate. But you don’t love the process of looking at LinkedIn and sending emails. You think to yourself
that it might be easily automated.
Therefore, you can use watsonx Orchestrate to create a skill that finds candidates on LinkedIn, collects a list of all candidates, and emails those candidates about the opportunity.
You can create another skill that sends out calendar invites for interviews to that list. You can link those skills together to automate the entire pipeline of obtaining candidates on that platform.
Prebuilt and custom skills
On watsonx Orchestrate, you find prebuilt apps with skills that range from working with productivity tools to providing deep analytical insights into your data.
Consider the following information about prebuilt apps and skills:
- Prebuilt skills are available to every skill set by default.
- Prebuilt skills cannot be removed from a skill set.
- Prebuilt skills include basic capabilities, such as the ability to do basic math operations.
watsonx Orchestrate have prebuilt apps that contain skills that ranging from working with productivity tools to providing deep analytical insights into your data. You can also create your skills by using a set of convenient connectors to services like Box and Gmail. Think about all the skills and work patterns that you see every day that you can automate:
You can also create your skills by using a set of convenient connectors to services like Box and Gmail. Think about all the skills and work patterns that you see every day that you can automate:
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Common business tasks that include managing international schedules, math functions, reminders.
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Events that include sending emails, scheduling, managing files.
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Business applications that include fetching, updating, and moving data.
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Business data analysis that includes getting insights and recommendations from AI to make informed decisions.
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Working with people, such as assigning work, managing schedules, submitting ideas, getting approvals.
Along with that, you have the possibility to create conversational experiences with AI assistants where you can create skill-based actions from your skills and configure built-in integrations to meet users where they are.
Skill-based actions are the skills that you add to AI assistants to implement orchestration for specific conversations. Any skill, even if it's a prebuilt or a custom skill, can be used as a skill-based action if its app is connected for a AI assistant environment.
The possibilities are limitless.
When you craft a skill, you provide everything, from the API endpoint to the rules that dictate how a user can use a skill. In watsonx Orchestrate, you can build custom skills in the following ways:
| Skill type | Description |
|---|---|
| Automation | Automations represent a set of business logics through decisions and workflow models. Decision models help you capture business decisions in a decision diagram. While workflow models help you to model business processes over a sequence of activities such as workflows, decisions, automations, or skills. For more information, see Building automations. |
| Imported | - Imported skills are created by importing the OpenAPI document for a service or discovered from apps. - Imported skills behave like prebuilt skills, except that they might be included on a per tenant basis. - The capability and presentation of imported skills are defined in their OpenAPI document. For more information, see Building skills. |
| Skill flow | Skill flows are a collection of skills from different apps. You can use skill flows to run a sequence of skills that relate to a set of tasks. For more information, see Combining skills into skill flows. |
The following diagram shows individual skills, skill group, and what a skill set can do for you related to skills:
When you publish an automation, import APIs from apps or OpenAPI specifications, or create a skill flow, you get the following statuses:
| Status | Description |
|---|---|
| Ready to publish | - If the OpenAPI specification of a newly added skill successfully passes the x-ibm-annotations validation, it is set to the Ready to publish status.- During the x-ibm-annotations validation,
the system verifies that all required annotations are present and that any optional annotations added have the appropriate values.- If an OpenAPI file is imported without the required x-ibm-annotations, the system
automatically adds them. |
| Published |
|
Check out how to use a skill and what skills can do
From the skill catalog, click the app that you want to use. Then, you can view specific information about the skills that the app offers, such as:
- A description of the skill.
- The phrase that you must give to run the skill.
- The data that the skill set requires from you to complete the work.
- A confirmation that the work was completed.
The following image illustrates how you can view skill information from the skill tile:
In addition to add skills to your skill sets to complete your tasks, you can count on the natural language to recognize and understand your queries and get answers.
Usage of skills
After you find out what apps and skills fit better to your business needs, you can then use them by:
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Adding skills to a skill set and start them directly in the watsonx Orchestrate chat.
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Adding skill-based actions to AI assistants to and start them in the AI assistant chat or the watsonx Orchestrate Beta chat.
For more information on how to use skills, see Using the chat and Building AI assistants.
What to do next
Learn to use, manage, and build skills and apps based on your role on watsonx Orchestrate.
| User role | Details |
|---|---|
| Access the watsonx Orchestrate chat and use its capabilities, which include purpose-built AI assistants and skills. | |
| Apart from accessing watsonx Orchestrate chat, you can build skills from apps and OpenAPI files, combine skills into skill flows, enhance your skill, and more. | |
| Apart from using and building apps and skills, you can also monitor the skill usage of your team. |
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