We’re excited to announce the release of a new extension for Request Tracker (RT) that integrates AI features to help your team work more efficiently. RT-Extension-AI adds AI assistance directly into RT, both through automated scripts and interactively within the ticket editor.
AI Prototype
As we started to experiment with AI options in RT, we had the opportunity to collaborate with a talented group of computer science students from the University at Buffalo on an initial prototype. The team spent a semester getting up to speed on creating an RT extension and adding various AI features to the interface. At the end of the semester, the CS department has a big demo day for all semester projects and they had some fun creating an exciting marketing video for the new features.
RT-Extension-AI Initial Release
We continue to polish the extension and have now released the first version, available to run with RT 6. You can see updated versions of the available features below.
AI-Powered Features
The extension introduces several AI-driven features.
Sentiment and Ticket Summaries
The extension includes new scrip actions to submit ticket content to your AI provider to assess how the ticket is going so far and store the results in custom fields on the ticket.
- Analyze Ticket Sentiment: The AI receives the latest reply and assesses the user’s sentiment as Satisfied, Dissatisfied, or Neutral and stores the result.
- Generate Ticket Summary: The AI creates a concise summary of the ticket history, assesses the current situation, and lists any next steps. This is then saved in a custom field on the ticket.
These are installed as standard scrip actions, so you can create scrips with whatever conditions you want to use, and apply them to queues as desired. In our testing we have mostly used the “On Correspond” condition to re-run the actions each time a new reply is added.
Editor Features
Several AI tools are also integrated directly into the RT editor, available via an “AI Assist” menu in the toolbar.
- Autocomplete: As you type a reply, the extension suggests the next few words to complete your sentence.
- Adjust Tone: You can have the AI paraphrase a block of text to make it more polite, concise, and customer-friendly.
- AI Suggestion: The AI can suggest a response to the current issue on the ticket. This option will be very depended on the prompt you configure.
- Translate: The extension can accept a block of text from your response and then translate it to the language you choose.
BYO AI
The video above shows interactions with Google Gemini, but we know users will want to integrate with their own AI provider. The extension is built to connect to any AI provider that has a REST API. We have tested it with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini so far.
You can configure the API endpoint and authentication details to match your provider’s requirements. The extension also allows you to specify different AI models for different tasks. For example, you can use a faster model for the autocomplete feature to ensure quick suggestions.
Flexible Configuration
The RT-Extension-AI is designed to be flexible and work with your existing support workflow and tools. You can set up a default, global AI configuration for your entire RT instance, and you can also define specific configurations for individual queues.
Each feature described above sends a prompt to the AI API along with the content, and these prompts can have a big impact on the results you get back. You can customize the prompts for each feature and for each queue. This allows you to guide the AI to process content differently for a support queue or a sales queue.
Time for a Test Drive
If you’re already using AI in your day-to-day work, you’re probably ready to take the new AI extension for a test drive. Note that it needs RT 6 to run, so you may need to plan an upgrade first.
This is just the start and we expect to add and update as we continue to experiment. Have some ideas for how AI can help your RT? We’d love to year from you, just send your ideas to contact@bestpractical.com.
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