How to Integrate a SAP Conversational AI Chatbot with SAP GUI

This blog post describes how to create a chatbot using SAP Conversational AI and integrate the chatbot with SAP GUI. With this integration, users can harness the benefits of SAP Conversational AI in the SAP GUI screen.

Introduction

SAP Conversational AI is a bot-building platform that gives you the ability to build and deploy a conversational agent in your application. It provides a web user interface that serves as a platform to create, build, and test chatbots for your business and individual needs.

Problem Description

The Bot Connector API gives you access to many messaging channels. However, bot integration with SAP GUI cannot be done directly ­– it needs to be customized.

You will learn

• How to create an FAQ chatbot.
• How to use a bot connector to do a Webchat integration.
• About the basic customization of the chat window.
• Integration of webchat in a SAP GUI screen.

Prerequisites

• You have an SAP Conversational AI account
• You have access to an SAP development system (back end)

Implementation Guide

An FAQ bot retrieves answers to users’ questions from one or more documents (.csv file) that you upload. The document must include predefined pairs of questions and answers. This allows your bot to map the user’s query to the best match and get an answer without interpreting the question’s intent. For an overview of how to create an FAQ chatbot, see this short video.

To create an FAQ bot from scratch, refer to this documentation.
In a summary, the following are the steps involved in chatbot development.

• Identifying the use case
• Creating an FAQ bot
• Uploading FAQ documents
• Optimizing and formatting your uploaded documents uploaded
• Adjusting bot skills and handling small talk
• Testing your bot
• Connecting to your application via the available channels
• Deploying, monitoring, and improving your chatbot.

The following diagram clearly illustrates bot creation milestones:

Bot Integration

The Bot Connector API gives you access to multiple messaging channels, but this blog focuses on Webchat. The Webchat channel was developed by the SAP Conversational AI team and is an open-source project on GitHub.

How to Use Webchat channel

• Switch to the Connect tab. All available channels appear under the User’s channels.
• Choose ‘+’ to create a new webchat channel.

• Configure details like color, button title, bot picture, user picture, and so on. If you wish, you can restrict messages from users to 512 characters or less. For example, you may want to do this if users tend to add a lot of details that obscure the intent of the request. Once done, choose Create

• Add the following script to your web page to integrate the created Webchat channel.

Note: You can find channelId and token in the Bot Connector when creating a Webchat channel. The channelId and token uniquely identify the channel your bot is connected to. This is the only information you need to connect your bot to the channel (in non-authenticated scenarios). We do not recommend adding the script directly to your web page where these tokens could be discovered and copied.

• Link the created channel to available environments by selecting from the dropdown and then clicking the link button.

• The channel is linked to the selected environment.

Your Webchat channel is now ready to be integrated with SAP GUI or in fact in any web application. But we will restrict ourselves to integrate with SAP GUI.

ABAP code for calling the chatbot in SAP GUI

• Standard Classes: CL_DEMO_OUTPUT and CL_DEMO_OUTPUT_HTML can be used to call the chatbot by passing the created Webchat script using the DISPLAY_HTML method.

• CL_DEMO_OUTPUT: This class is used to output data using the CL_DEMO_OUTPUT_HTML class. If an SAP GUI is active, the result, which is converted to HTML by CL_DEMO_OUTPUT_HTML, is displayed after calling the DISPLAY_HTML method.

• CL_DEMO_OUTPUT_HTML: Converts the demo output stream to HTML. The standard code calls an M (Medium) size window in the  CL_ABAP_BROWSER=>SHOW_HTML method.

• You can also create wrappers for the classes based on the customization required.

Result

After successful integration, you would be able to chat with the bot very similar to a chatbot on any webpage. It is fast and helpful in assisting the users with their queries.

Conclusion

This blog post should help you connect your bot with SAP GUI with customization in the chat window. The same integration is possible with the SAP Conversational AI Web Client also.
Please feel free to contact us with any questions you may have.

Thanks for reading this blog post, hopefully, you enjoyed it.

For more information about SAP Conversational AI:

• Visit our web page
• Engage with our SAP Community
• Read our blogs, follow our tutorials and earn your badge on openSAP
• Ask your questions on SAP Answers
• Read our product documentation
• Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube