Documentation for the classic Watson Assistant experience has moved. For the most up-to-date version, see Managing workflow with versions.
Managing workflow with versions
Versions help you manage the workflow of a dialog skill development project.
Create a skill version to capture a snapshot of the training data (intents and entities) and dialog in the skill at key points during the development process. Being able to save an in-progress skill at a specific point in time is especially useful as you start to fine tune your assistant. You often need to make a change and see the impact of the change in real time before you can determine whether or not the change improves or lessens the effectiveness of the assistant. Based on your findings from a test environment deployment, you can make an informed decision about whether to deploy a given change to an assistant that is deployed in a production environment.
If you have a free (Lite) plan, you cannot create skill versions.
To learn more about how versions can improve the workflow you use to build an assistant, read this blog post.
Creating a version
You can edit only one version of the dialog skill at a time. The in-progress version is called the development version.
When you save a version, any skill settings that you applied to the development version are saved also.
To create a dialog skill version, follow these steps:
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From the header of the skill, click Save new version, and then describe the current state of the skill.
Adding a good description will help you to distinguish multiple versions from one another later.
Add the date you deploy the version to its description to make it easier to filter logs by version from the Analytics page later. For more information, see Picking a data source.
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Click Save.
A snapshot is taken of the current skill and saved as a new version. You remain in the development version of the skill. Any changes you make continue to be applied to the development version, not the version you saved. To access the version you saved, go to the Versions page.
If you have trouble creating the version, check that your skill does not have any entities with large numbers of values (such as 10,000 or more synonyms for a single entity). If it does, try to break the entity into many, more categorized entities, or consider using a contextual entity instead.
Deploying a skill version
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From the skill menu, click Versions.
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Click the
icon from the version you want to deploy, and then choose Assign.A list of assistants to which you can link this version is displayed. The list is limited to those assistants that don't have any skills associated with them, or that are associated with a different version of this skill.
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Click the checkbox for one or more of the assistants, and then click Assign.
Keep track of when this version is deployed to an assistant and for how long. It is likely that you will want to analyze user conversations that occur between users and this specific version of the skill. You can get this information from the Analytics page. However, when you pick a data source, versions are not listed. You must choose the name of the assistant to which you deployed this version. You can then filter the metrics data to show only those conversations that occurred between the start and end dates of the time frame during which this skill version was deployed to the assistant.
Skill version limits
The number of versions you can create for a single skill depends on your Watson Assistant plan.
| Service plan | Versions per skill |
|---|---|
| Enterprise | 50 |
| Premium (legacy) | 50 |
| Plus | 10 |
| Trial | 10 |
| Lite | 0 |
Swapping skills
If you find that an earlier version of the skill did a better job of recognizing and addressing customer needs than a later version, you can swap the skill that is linked to the assistant to use the earlier version instead.
Follow the same steps you use to deploy a skill version to change the version that is linked to an assistant.
Accessing a saved version
The only way to view a saved version is to overwrite the in-progress development version of the skill with the saved version. (But not before you have saved any work you have done in the current development version.)
You cannot edit a saved version. To achieve the same goal, you can use a saved version as the basis for a new version in which you incorporate any changes you want to make. To start development work from a saved version, overwrite the in-progress development version of the skill with the saved version.
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Save any changes you made to the skill since the last time you created a version.
Save a version of the skill now. Otherwise, your work will be lost when you follow these steps.
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From the version you want to edit, click the Skill actions
icon, and then choose Revert to this version and confirm the action.The page refreshes to revert to the state that the skill was in when the version was created.
If you want to save any changes that you make to this version, you must save the skill as a new version. You cannot apply changes to an already-saved version.
When you open a skill by clicking the skill tile from the assistant page, the development version of the skill is displayed. Even if you associated a later version with the assistant, when you access the skill, its development version opens.
Downloading a skill version
You can download a dialog skill version in JSON format. You might want to download a skill version if you want to use a specific version of a dialog skill in a different instance of the Watson Assistant service, for example. You can download the version from one instance and import it to another instance as a new dialog skill.
To download a dialog skill version, complete the following steps:
- From the skill menu, click Versions.
- Click the icon from the version you want to download, and then choose Export.
- Specify a name for the JSON file and where to save it, and then click Save.