DRYiCE Lucy v8.0

The release notes capture the details of features and functionalities introduced in DRYiCE Lucy as part of its major release version 8.0. This release follows assisted upgrade, details on which can be found in the Upgrading to New Version section. For any queries/clarifications, please reach out to Support.

Version 8 focuses on bringing low code capabilities to developers by introducing a conversational designer and workflow editor along with multi-skill orchestration to simplify intent recognition for multi-domain implementations.

What’s new?

Following are the newly launched features and functionalities as part of DRYiCE Lucy v8.0

• Conversational Designer: A new console is added to create and update conversation flows easily using a drag and drop Interface. This feature drastically reduces the manual workload of conversational admins.
• Drag & Drop Notification Workflow Builder: This feature is added to integrate different components (e.g., Openwhisk actions, notifications, mailers, SMS, Document Discovery Crawler, and ServiceNow for ticket creation and update) together with the help of drag and drop flow diagrams. This console eliminates the need for writing code for creating action-based flows. This allows 3rd party system to push notifications to Lucy.
• Adaptive Card Designer: For enhancing conversation design functionality, we have added a new feature where designers can design and test adaptive cards before rolling them out to adaptive-card specific channels such as Teams or the web from Lucy itself.
• Adaptive Card Support on Web: Adaptive card was previously supported in Microsoft Teams only, is now available on the web Channel.
• Multi-Skill Orchestration: In implementations where multiple skills are created, sometimes user experience gets degraded to explicit skill selection. Multi-skill orchestration receives a response from the respective skill without having the user choose the skill from the menu. This orchestration provides 3 new models:
  • Waterfall Model
  • Broadcast Model
  • Conductor-Follower Model
• User-Based Billing Model: With release 8, tenants can be created with number of users as metrics for billing. Previously, billing was based on number of conversations.
• Scheduler Broadcast Capability: This functionality allows Lucy to send broadcast messages (proactive notifications) to all the known users in an organization using the scheduler module.
• Lucy Socket Connection Service: A new wrapper service to communicate with external applications exposing a web socket. This service allows developers to encapsulate APIs with web socket transport instead of HTTP. This allows Lucy to be connected to more systems.
• In-house NLP-2-SQL Trainer: This functionality allows to conveniently train Lucy’s NLP model with the database schema along with stored procedures to generate SQL queries from the user’s natural language query.
• Chat UI V3: A new and improved mechanism to render web chat UI using a no-code interface to control and customize the UI as per requirement.
• Listing on HCL SoFy: Lucy is now listed as a product (SaaS offering) on HCL Software’s product and solution catalog.
• Enterprise Connectors: New out-of-the-box (OTB) connectors are available for enterprise applications:
  1. ServiceNow Virtual Assistant
  2. Solarwinds ITSM
  3. Genesys Pure Cloud Live Chat
• New Channels: For enhancing multichannel experience across multiple platforms, support on Google Chat (GChat, on Google Workspace) has been added.

What is enhanced?

Following features and functionalities that have been improved as part of DRYiCE v8.0:

• Homegrown Gateway Multi-user deployment: To enhance the capability of Homegrown gateway, an option for multi-user deployment has been added. With the help of this feature, more than one user can make configuration changes on the application, and it will get reflected for other users who have access to the same VM in which the homegrown gateway app is installed.
• Report Optimization: An option for downloading query data for the past 90 days (3 months) in between any given date range has been added to enhance analytics capabilities. Reports can be downloaded for data on resolved and unresolved queries.
• Pre-execution handlers: The functionality to perform actions from Lucy’s end and get JSON response on the parameters of Openwhisk function is added to the integration module. These actions provide a mechanism for the developers to create complex use-cases with minimal coding.
• Attachment Functionality on Web: Event APIs can be used for temporarily uploading attachments from a user, which can be forwarded to respective integration using pre-signed URLs.
• Push Notifications for ServiceNow on Teams: Event APIs can be registered in ServiceNow to push notifications to users on the Microsoft Teams channel.
• Push Notifications for Web using scheduler module: The scheduler module has been enhanced to be able to push notifications to the web channel in addition to the earlier supported channels of Teams and E-mail.
• User Interface and Experience: New dark/light mode user themes are available to be used on the chat window and admin dashboards, for better readability and accessibility.
• Openwhisk function configuration: Now, developers can set their own timeouts for functions and choose custom memory that each function can use with a simple click of a button.
• Developer Interface Experience: New experience is available on Openwhisk code editors to conveniently check logs on the same editor window and other interface changes for advanced debugging.
• OS & Android App Global App: Provides wrapper of Lucy instance for customers through a single skeleton app which allows to configure Lucy customer URL. Also, other enhancements are as follows:
  1. Pull to Refresh
  2. Speech to text
  3. Service Worker

Following are the bugs fixed as part of the DRYiCE Lucy v8.0 release:

• Fixed: Loading issues for JS files on Chat UI v2
• Fixed: UCD console issues on saving responses
• Fixed: Translator issues on translating SOPs with HTML
• Fixed: Spellchecker concatenation problem
• Fixed: Markdown issues on other channels
• Fixed: Validation issues on Publish API
• Fixed: Inline viewing of assets
• Fixed: Knowledge management console issues for Q&A
• Fixed: URL context blocking conversation context
• Fixed: Microsoft helper to extract from HTML
• Fixed: Automated exception mailer
• Fixed: UI-related consistency issues on admin consoles
• Fixed: Modal close on clicking outside, blocking usage on multiple consoles
• Fixed: Slack HTML rendering issues
• Fixed: Broadcast rate limiting issue
• Fixed: Same user contacting different bot with conflicting context

The following changes were made to improve the performance and security of DRYiCE Lucy v8.0 in comparison to the older versions:

• Socket connections optimization
• Newer notification events created for optimal performance
• Removed unused events
• All events are made inline functions for better memory management
• Reduced API call on chat window
• Faster loads with pre-minified assets
• Differed loading for better load times with dynamic UI
• Conversation handlers are optimized for better memory management
• Object Storage handlers are cached and better optimized
• Knowledge management services are fine-tuned
• Asset controller is refactored for best performance
• Actions on connector bot optimized for better memory management
• Route management fine-tuned for best performance
• Middleware is optimized for express
• Rendering engine optimized for faster SSR (Server-Side Rendering)
• Overall code base refactoring for better CPU usage and memory footprint
• Deployment related optimization
• Cached control optimized
• Refactoring of Secure gateway codebase
• Module aliasing implemented to avoid dot-dot attacks
• Refactored BOT connect API for faster responses

Deprecated feature(s) means that the feature(s) is(are) at the end of support, and its alternative must be used. Although the feature will continue to work, it is not recommended to use them.

• Conversation history API is deprecated and removed due to security concerns. As an alternative, we now provide a pre-execution handler for conversation history, which would directly pass the conversation history to the functions.

Following are the limitations/restrictions with respect to the features and functionalities released as part of DRYiCE Lucy v8.0:

• Event APIs from workflows will have an API rate limit. Connect with Lucy support team to get the latest limitation as these are re-evaluated continuously.
• Version 8 will mandate change of Lucy Endpoint URL.

DRYiCE Lucy is hosted on IBM Cloud & Google Cloud Platform and is available as SaaS. System Requirements are Not Applicable (NA).

DRYiCE Lucy v8.0 release is a major version release that includes Assisted Upgrade. DRYiCE Lucy follows automatic rollback in case of failure of deployment for any feature/ functionality during the upgrade.

To upgrade to DRYiCE Lucy v8.0, the Product Professional Services Team follows the below steps:

Note: The steps mentioned below are undertaken separately for each tenant within a customer environment. This means that if there are multiple environments like Production, Development, and Staging/User Acceptance Testing (UAT), each of these environments follows the below instructions:

• The PS Team verifies the current version of DRYiCE Lucy implemented in the customer environment (DRYiCE Lucy v8.0 has a “One-click” automated upgrade functionality to upgrade a selected
• tenant. For DRYiCE Lucy versions older than v8.0, the upgradation process is manual. For this, a mutually agreed time slot is confirmed between the customer and the PS Team).
• The Providers will access and review the existing functionalities/features within the customer environment and share the impact with respect to upgrading to v8.0.
• Non-Production environments should be a logical replica of Production before upgradation.
• This upgrade is through a Provider-owned model, where providers find the upgrade card for the tenants who are eligible or not through which the tenant can be upgraded. This can be found on the
• Configure page of the tenant by clicking the gear icon next to the tenant on the tenant listing page.
• For Provider-owned Model, the Provider Admin or the Provider SPOC can follow the steps mentioned on the Upgrade page to upgrade the tenant automatically.
• In case of any issue, please raise a support ticket on the Support link of DRYiCE Lucy. Lucy Professional Services team also needs to create a task on the JIRA portal.

DRYiCE Lucy is a conversation AI platform. It provides extensive capabilities to create conversational agents which mimic human interaction, learn, and adapt to user needs through smart conversations by leveraging enterprise-grade Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML). Users can leverage Lucy to find relevant information across different enterprise systems.

Lucy helps organizations move up the maturity curve and enhance the user experience for employees and customers. By leveraging advanced natural language processing, Lucy reduces human errors and increases productivity. It comes with out-of-the-box use cases for various scenarios and can be easily extended to cover the “Cognitive chatbot” needs of modern enterprises.

For any queries/clarifications, please reach out to us on Support.