ASK — the built-in assistant

A panel on every screen that answers questions about your data and can carry out the work, under exactly your permissions.

Every page carries an ASK panel. It answers questions about the business and it can run the work — it drives TRANXACT’s own API with your session, so it cannot do anything you could not do by clicking through the console.

Answers in plain business language

ASK answers the way a colleague would: with document numbers, names, amounts and dates. It does not show system addresses, internal identifiers or field names, and the steps it lists read as what was done — "found PO-000123", "updated its lines" — not as calls to the system.

• When ASK has to try something a second way behind the scenes, that retry is its own business and is not shown to you as a failed step. A step is marked as failed only when it actually failed you.
• Show technical detail, under an answer, keeps the raw detail for support. Open it when a support person asks for it; you should not need it otherwise.

Asking well

• Say which company and period you mean if it is not the one you are standing in. ASK works inside your current scope by default.
• Ask for the thing, not the screen: "which supplier invoices are overdue by more than 30 days" rather than "open the aging report".
• Ask "how do I…?" to learn how something is done. ASK answers with the steps and changes nothing.
• Ask "who approves PO-000123?" and ASK answers from that order’s own approval routing — the people it is actually with, level by level — not from the list of users.
• Read the action trail before accepting an answer that changed something. It is there to be read, and it is the difference between a tool you can rely on and one you have to trust.

Nothing changes until you confirm

ASK never changes anything on its own. Before any change — creating a record, updating or deleting one, submitting or approving it, copying it, changing an approval rule — it stops and shows you what it will do, under "ASK will do this only when you confirm:": a plain list naming each record by its document number, with the values that will be set, and Confirm and Cancel beneath.

• Confirm, or a plain "yes", "go ahead" or "do it", carries out exactly what was shown, and nothing else.
• Cancel, or "no", leaves everything as it was.
• Several changes asked for together are listed together and confirmed once — one Confirm, not one per record.
• An answer with a change in it — "yes, but make it twelve" — is not a yes. ASK proposes again with the change and waits once more.
• Only the latest proposal can be confirmed. A Confirm from further up the conversation is no longer offered.
• Questions need no confirmation. Asking what something is, where it is or how to do it changes nothing, so ASK simply answers.

Asked to change a record, ASK changes that record. "Add two more lines to PO-000123" or "change the supplier on it" finds the purchase order and updates it — its header, or its lines — instead of making another purchase order beside it.

Talking to ASK

The microphone button beside Send lets you ask out loud and hold a conversation. Press it, speak, and stop.

• The first time, ASK asks your consent before the microphone is switched on — what is switched on, where the sound goes, and how to stop it. Then your browser asks its own permission. Choose "Don’t ask me again on this device" to be asked only once; your answer is kept for you alone, so somebody else signing in on the same machine is asked for theirs.
• Your words appear in the box as you speak them, so you can see what is being heard.
• When you stop, the question waits in the box: "Is this what you asked? Sending in 4 s". Change a word and it stops counting and waits for Send; press Send now to go at once, Wait to hold it, or Discard to throw it away. Nothing is asked until the words are the ones you meant.
• The answer is shown as usual and read aloud, and ASK then listens for your next question — a conversation. Saying nothing ends it; Stop talking, the lit microphone button or closing the panel ends it at once.
• Two ticks under the box set this up for you: whether spoken answers are read aloud, and whether a spoken question is sent by itself after the countdown or always waits for Send.

Asking in your own language

ASK answers in the language you ask in, whatever language the console is set to. A warehouse supervisor whose console is in English can ask in Tamil and hear the answer in Tamil. The choice under the ASK box, "Listen for", decides how a spoken question is heard.

• Either way, the question is typed into the box first, so you can see what was heard before it is asked.
• The answer is typed in the panel and read aloud through the speaker, in the language you asked in.
• A typed question is answered in the language it is written in, too.
• A question too short to tell — a document number, or three words that could be several languages — is answered in the language your console is set to, which is your stated preference. English is asked for by name when it is the answer, so an engine cannot drift into a language of its own.
• Under an answer in a language other than the console’s, a note says "Answered in" and names the language.
• And the answer is checked, not only asked for: the language is repeated with the question itself, and an answer that still comes back in another language is put into yours before you see it.

A language TRANXACT does not ship

Ask in a language outside the seventeen and ASK answers in the nearest one it has, rather than falling back to English — a Nepali speaker is far more likely to read Hindi than English. The note under the answer says it is the nearest TRANXACT language to what you spoke.

Dashboards from a sentence

Ask ASK to "create a dashboard" or "keep an eye on" something and it pins tiles to your own dashboard rather than only opening a screen — see Dashboards and boards → Asking ASK to build a dashboard.

Working with the panel open

The ASK panel opens beside the page — on the right, or on the left when the console is in Arabic or another right-to-left language — so you can keep reading the screen while you ask about it.

• The page lays itself out for the space left beside the panel, not for the whole window. On a tablet such as an iPad Pro, a page that would be cramped at that width switches to its narrower layout, exactly as it would on a smaller screen.
• Edit forms, dialogs and the Find palette open over the page, beside the panel, instead of sliding underneath it. You can have a record’s Edit form open and ASK open at the same time, and see both.
• In a narrow window, such as a phone or a tablet held upright, the panel takes the full width, and closing it gives the page back.
• The dialogs for service accounts and for choosing a file from a drive or an attachment open as proper dialogs, over a dimmed page, rather than as a box drawn in the middle of the screen.