HCL Clara - Your Intelligent Virtual Assistant!

The recent popularity of chatbots is not just a technological trend. Over time, chatbots have become a must for companies to meet the most different customer needs. Today, chatbots continue to evolve to provide rapid, consistent, error-free responses and deliver a flexible, fully interactive UX across products and services.  Since in HCLSoftware we are great chatbot believers, we have decided to give more power to Clara, our intelligent virtual assistant. 

Meet HCL Clara

An Intelligent Virtual Assistant, recognizes human input and provides responses by tapping into a rich, specialized knowledge base. Clara enables direct interaction with the users of HCLSoftware products by leveraging enterprise grade Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) to execute actions. 

Clara is the product expert that users can consult to learn the product capabilities (“what can I do” and “how can I do it”). Clara goes beyond FAQs to executes routine tasks via contextual conversations that upsurges end user’s satisfaction. Clara interacts in the way your clients wish to consume the information they need, helping you accelerate time to value, reduce human error and increase productivity. Clara speeds up learning curve on new functions, manages the how-to questions and initiates the troubleshooting of HCLSoftware products conveniently with voice command or simple text chat. 

a. Figure 1. Clara for Workload Automation

b. Figure 2. Clara for BigFix

Why HCL Clara? 

Clara is currently integrated with BigFix and Workload Automation, and will be soon integrated with all the other HCLSoftware products. By leveraging its NLP capability, Clara is able to converse with users, comprehend their questions, search from different available documents, provide the required information and support them in performing actions. Clara transforms the user experience from a search-based model to a conversational model, reducing the lifecycle of information retrieval process, and boosting the overall user experience. 

Key Benefits

Clara offers a human-like, personalized, round-the-clock experience to the users of HCLSoftware products by providing the following benefits:  

• Minimize the FAQ-type calls 
• Reduce wait time 
• Available 24×7 
• Speed up learning curve on new features 
• 100% response consistency 
• Reduce common-issues and repetitive incidents 
• Improve through experience 
• Promote best practices 
• Support multiple users at the same time 

Key Capabilities

Clara makes HCLSoftware products quick and easy to use, by offering a conversational interface to access the product knowledge base, providing recommendations and best practices to support the end-users in performing actions. Clara provides the following capabilities: 

• Interactions in natural language 
• Easy and intuitive training modules 
• Intuitive conversation definition via UI 
• Action script and external language support for integration 
• External interface for third party integration 
• Robust AI/NLP based intent identification engine 
• Voice recognition 
• Pre-built Knowledge Base 
• Clara is shipped with a product specific KB that covers the most frequently asked questions and the hottest topics related to a new product release. Clara provides answers using also product documentation, videos, forum, blogs, etc.  
• Pre-built set of Actions 
• Clara leverages HCLSoftware products APIs to enable users to automate business processes and troubleshoot problems 
• Easy to expand 
• Clara can be easily extended with new Q&As (product related or specific to customer environment) and new actions to perform on the product 
• Integration with communication channels 
• Clara is integrated with tools that your team is already using. Call Clara directly from your HCLSoftware product or from common messaging channels such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Twitter, Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, Skype and SameTime 
• Integration with Service Management Systems such as ServiceNow

What’s new in HCL Clara?

A new release of Clara is now available! It contains the following enhancements:  

Conversational flow close to human interaction 

• Retain the context of the conversation in progress to identify the intents more efficiently 
• Memorize the historical conversations and the entities to make use of them in the future 
• Predict the next conversation based on the current one and build the conversation flow at runtime 
• Learn from the previous conversations improving the quality of training with self-learning capabilities 

 Better answers

• Answer product related questions leveraging the product documentation, by using an advanced semantic search engine combined with Machine Learning technologies 
• Enrich the Knowledge Base with HCL Support cases (most frequent questions, troubleshooting scenarios) 

 Visualize information

• Provide a new graph generator to translate query results in a more intuitive visualization 

c. Figure 3. New graph generator

Improve security 

• Improve security to guarantee a better control in accessing HCL Products 

Extend communication channel 

• Integrate with SameTime messaging platform

Improve installation experience 

• Simplify installation experience for Linux users 

Other improvements 

• Delete Clara chat 
• Export Clara chat (e.g. export to HTTP) 

If you want to know more about Clara: 

• Visit us – Clara website 
• Read more – Clara documentation 

To get in touch with Clara Team, contact: HCLSolutionsSupport@hcl.com 

Blog co-authored by Marina Fabbri.