This update sees the introduction of Affino’s AI Services, the core of which is the ability to turn your content into interactive chat AI’s. It is possible to set up AI prototypes within minutes and then train up and deploy full scale expert, support or indeed entertainment AI’s in short order trained from your articles and forum threads. Simply set up each AI using the AI Profiles and make each one live on their own dedicated AI Channel. You can then launch a whole suite of AI’s which can work alongside each other and your team.

It means you can now create a whole new generation of great experiences for your audiences with AI’s able to take your content much further than simply displaying a list of articles for users to read.

Affino’s AI services have gone through multiple generations in our research and development lab - to ensure that we are providing enterprise grade services right from the outset. We have built them on the best of breed AI technology available today, with a focus on providing the best quality answers and experiences from day one, for both the AI owners and users.

For more details please see the release notes:

www.affino.com/blogs/social-commerce-blog/affino-903---the-a...

Upgrade Guidance 

It is important to liaise with the support team to schedule an update window where they can be on hand to support the update. It is essential that you run through the complete update process starting with the Affino Updater, followed by the sequence of the system and design updates laid out on the Control > Update screen.

As we have rolled out enhanced message sending and analytics engines to better handle bot clicks and human clicks, we advise you thoroughly run test messages to ensure the messages are sending as expected.

NOTE - Alongside this major update, we are updating many of the core Affino infrastructure elements including OS, Application stack and database services. This means that you will need to schedule the upgrade with the Affino team.

NOTE - If you’re using Stripe, we advise you upgrade to the 2024 version within the Developer screen on the Stripe dashboard and test thoroughly on your staging site. This is particularly important if you are on a version earlier than 2023 as their API changes each year. You may need to consult your Stripe representative for further details and assistance.

NOTE - This release sees both a new Message Send Engine and Message Click Tracking Engine. These are major components which have been created from the ground up. You must ensure you thoroughly test your Message Campaigns. Note that the message statistics moving forward will be different from how they have been to-date, in effect this will be a new baseline for more accurate message stats going forward. A major component has been improved bot detection and handling, however as increasingly it is simply not possible to tell between bots and humans reading your messages - there are limitations on what can be done here.

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Behind the scenes we provide the tools for managing the AI content, with near real-time updating of the AIs, and a bit slower when training with 100,000’s of articles. We provide a powerful set of AI configuration options, with useful feedback reporting and usage tracking against individuals and companies. There is extensive usage analytics through the new dedicated AI Dashboard and enhanced AI Channel Analysis.

Crucially you will be able to monetise your AI services from day one through subscriptions and ads, and can use them either on a standalone basis, or as part of an integrated media experience.

Affino provides a suite of AI advisory and support services alongside the Affino AI SaaS, including extensive AI training, AI content and commercial advisory, focus groups, help guides, and support.

There are a host of other significant updates including support for the WebP image format across Affino, a lossless and lossy compression format for images that are perfectly suited for websites as file sizes are smaller in comparison to PNGs and JPGs. You can now upload WebP images within articles, forums and directories, creating media items for re-use across the site. This is an important step forward for SEO, with smaller web pages and faster experiences. Since WebP is now supported by all major browsers and devices - the timing feels right.

Another significant improvement on the SEO and social platform integration side is that it is now possible to show a limited view on secured articles even without metering. This means social sharing and SEO both share relevant titles and images when accessed by bots and other users.

The message sending engine has seen major enhancements to better detect and report upon message clicks. We now report on two sets of values for clicks so you can better understand what proportion of those clicks are from detected bots compared to human interaction. We now differentiate between Bot Filtered clicks (clicks are filtered through the Bot Access Profile, Affino’s bot detection engine as well as the AbuseDB global cybersecurity database) and human clicks (where we can detect our cookie or consumed data against the user).

Commercial reporting updates include the Subscription Volume Report which has seen an important upgrade with two new tabs, showing the volume of subscriptions and subscribers for a given month, on top of the volume of subscriptions that are created for that period. This means you can now have at your disposal, a full picture of the subscription volume changes month on month.

Once again, we have continued to improve the awards entry, judging and management suite. You can now update submitted entries directly from the Control Centre,vastly shortcutting this administration process. We’ve also added the file name next to each download to make it easier to match downloaded media and included links to judge’s contact records, all in all some useful features to help navigate the necessary components within the awards workflow.

Furthermore, we have re-thought and re-worked how unpaid orders are utilised within our reporting suite. In previous versions, a single set of fields within CRM Settings were used across the Sales Report, Sales Targets and Sales Leaderboard. Though seemingly more efficient, this doesn’t provide the granularity needed by some of our clients. For instance, you may wish to include orders awaiting payment confirmation in the sales report but wish to exclude these for a particular Sales Targets. We have therefore provided dedicated Order Status and Payment Status settings for each report allowing for greater customisation.