The last two weeks have had a huge focus on stabilizing the coming AI and AI Agents 1.2.0 releases, meaning that not that many features have been added, but a lot of bug fixing. There are still some nice things that can be mentioned as visible progress.
AI Observability
The biggest release of the last two weeks is a new module called AI Observability that will ship with the AI module in 1.2.0 release!
We have had something called AI Logging in the AI Core module for a long time, and while that has been good for development purposes, when you want to use real observability of things like usage, tokens, errors etc, in enterprise production environments the normal flexible logging system is unbeatable.
This opens up using anything you can use the normal PSR Logger for and the idea is later to make it possible to support external observation tools like OpenTelemetry for instance.
There are already works with the Extended Logger module on how to make nicer visualizations for this going forward.
A huge thanks to EPAM for sponsoring this, and an extra huge thank you to Alexey Korepov and Antonio Estevez that have been working with this.
Force tools to run in Agents
One issue you might encounter when you are creating agents with a high context window, the need of many loops or that is using smaller models is that it might just not trigger one of the tools you have given to it.
This can be frustrating, when you see it collect the right information, even reason correctly and then it might output how it would use the tool instead of actually using it.
So we have added a simple checkbox on the tool settings in the agents, where you can check “Require Usage” and this will check whenever the agent claims that its finished, if it actually used the tool and nudges it to use it when not.
Config Action to setup Field Widget Actions
Currently we have Field Widget Actions being one of the cooler features in the 1.2.0 release. However at the moment, core is missing the possibility of actually attaching a Field Widget Actions to a field without having to redefine the whole form view.
We now have this in the AI module, including wildcard possibility, to be able to install Field Widget Actions all over the place.
At the same time there is a Drupal core issue for this, that we are waiting to get merged. This means that this is most likely just a temporary way of doing this until AI 2.0 is released.
Read PDF’s in Automators without any dependencies
The Automators has had both Unstructured.io and ConvertAPI integration now for years, making it possible to take an uploaded PDF (or multiple other file formats) and move that into a textarea on an entity.
However this requires dependencies, like API Keys or setting up complex infrastructure to host this yourself.
We wanted a way to do this without having to do that or even having to install something specific on the server. Something completely portable.
That now exists in the AI Simple PDF to Text module, that uses native PHP for the whole operation.
A new cool Toolbar Chatbot
Since most of the assistants/agents that you interact with are actually meant for helping site administrators or editors to use, that smaller design we had of the chatbot so far might be restrictive for longer conversations. Also the Canvas AI chatbot that is coming with Canvas already uses a more integrated design.
We wanted the same for the AI Chatbot. So, starting from 1.2.0 there is a new Toolbar placement and Toolbar style that will be the default Chatbot style going forward. This means for newer Chatbots you can try this out, but it's still completely backwards compatible of course.
Release candidate
We are getting closer to the stable version of 1.2.0. We have released a RC1 that takes us closer to that goal.
Other noticeable fixes:
