We are living in a transition to multi-experience. Specifically, your solutions will not only cover web and mobile but also other ways of user interaction like chatbots or voice. GeneXus 16 gives you tools to build them now.
Users will access the solutions through different channels that exceed the mobile and web, as we said, and where each channel has clear purposes. The Web is becoming the ideal channel to achieve a great reach, but when you want to gain commitment or loyalty, other channels like mobile and chatbots are more useful.
GeneXus 16 adds great value to these scenarios by creating the complete solution, where each component is integrated with the others (artificial intelligence, other layouts, charts or processes of the solution).
We have a generator of chatbots in GeneXus that greatly facilitates the creation of Chatbots or virtual assistants.
The chatbots that are modeled with GeneXus speak our language. But they are also integrated into the rest of the solution, so they can respond with screens of the solution where they inform us graphically about the query made (e.g.: response with information about bank account status, inline in the chat). But not only give answers, they can also perform tasks for us (e.g.: approve a payment order). So the value of what is created is enormous and it is enhanced by having integration with the whole solution.
To model this, GeneXus has a new object, "Conversational flow", where you define the flow of the conversation and based on that knowledge, GeneXus generates all the required pieces of software. It generates, sample web and sd panels with the UI to chat, as well as the server-side processes that interact with the UI. In addition, and this is central, it also generates the model to be trained in IBM Watson or Google Dialogflow
With this we have one more advantage in GeneXus: you can train the same model against any provider and then you choose the one that suits best for you.
More Information: Chatbots in GeneXus
In the transition to multi-experience and omnichannel, an aspect that is more important than ever is the consistency of the solution; that your solution offers - through all its channels - the desired experience.
A new concept is emerging in the industry, which is 'Design System'. It's a set of Principles, Patterns and Design Practices, which are established for a product or for a company and precisely aim to solve, among others, consistency.
In GeneXus 16 new concepts have been added to the knowledge base to describe a design system. We already had Themes and Patterns; now we added Base Styles (references to external CSS) and Stencils (multiplatform template objects for high UI layout reuse) and formalized the User Controls as objects in the knowledge base. Defining User Controls as objects in the knowledge base adds portability and a huge productivity increase since User Controls that once could take weeks to be used in a solution, could take now just days to be included in the KB. This makes it possible to easily define in GeneXus controls and styles from CSS frameworks like SemanticUI, Bootstrap, Pure CSS, Kube or others.
More Information: Design Systems
In addition to the above, which already produces a better experience, we have worked on innumerable features and details that give enormous flexibility to achieve the desired interfaces.
In that aspect, we believe that there is a tendency for things to flow more on the screens. GeneXus 16 adds improvements to transitions and animations, integration with the device, biometrics, and maps with different layers such as to make Uber-type applications or that are integrated with payment APIs even from China.
More Information: Flex Layout Container, DeviceAuthentication external object, Animation View User Control,
With the amount of data that the solutions are creating, new ways of analyzing them become imperative and in that sense, we have also worked on new charts giving more power to the Query Viewer. And in particular, GeneXus 16 has a new Dashboard object, with which you create a business dashboard to show Key Performance Indicators (KPI). Each indicator shows data from a data provider or a query.
More Information: Dashboard object