UiPath Task Mining 2022.10 Release

[Anna_Hotsa]

Hello UiPath Community!

We are thrilled to announce the release of Assisted Task Mining!

Overview

Starting this release, we are adding a new Task Mining approach called Assisted Task Mining to enable you to gain an even deeper understanding of existing business processes happening on employees’ desktops and discover new automation opportunities and process improvement areas!

You have 2 approaches for Task Mining now:

• Assisted Task Mining lets you empower your employees with the possibility of capturing variations of a known task and easily merging them into a comprehensive picture of the existing process!
• Unassisted Task Mining allows you to mine unknown tasks by recording your employees’ desktop activities and discovering repetitive tasks that are suited for automation and process improvement. This is what you know already as Task Mining today.

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What’s new in this release?

• Unified Task Mining Portal - this is a new shared space for you to start, manage, and store all Task Mining projects. You no longer need to worry about where to store or manage permissions to individual captured traces!
• Assisted Task Mining experience - invite Subject Matter Experts to record specific task variations, merge them into a comprehensive map, and process the results using a new diagram editor to gain even deeper insights into end-to-end processes.
• New Desktop Recorder Client - a new recorder client that enables you to capture the tasks for Assisted Task Mining projects.
• Variations Analysis & Merging - leverage the in-built ML technology to easily merge the collected data into a full picture of your task!

Note: If you are familiar with another UiPath product - Task Capture, you can think of Assisted Task Mining as an evolution of it as it provides a similar experience of capturing the known task with the addition of collaboration capabilities, shared storage, and merging of the variations of your task!

How to Get Started

Select the UiPath Task Mining service on the left-hand bar in your Automation Cloud environment
Note: if you don’t have the Task Mining service enabled, check this page to find out how to do it
Assisted Task Mining is available as part of the Task Mining service by default with no additional purchase of AI Units required

Now you are ready to use the Assisted Task Mining features!

Watch the quick demo below and walk through the key capabilities overview page to learn how to leverage them!

Overview Demo

Assisted Task Mining Demo

Glossary

From now on, let’s align on the terminology and abbreviations that are used in this post later:

• TM - Task Mining
• ATM - Assisted Task Mining
• UTM - Unassisted Task Mining
• BA - Business Analyst
• TC - Task Capture

FAQ

1. What is the difference between ATM and UTM?
   • Assisted Task Mining is one of the Task Mining approaches that is suitable for cases when you know the task to capture, but you want to collect different variations of it to easily build a full picture of it and accelerate preparation for automation.
   • In the ATM project type, it’s recommended to capture different traces (variations) of the same task that can be recorded by the same or different users (up to 10).
   • After the collecting of the traces is finished, the project owner/CoE lead/BA/Automation Champion can review the collected results and merge them together to generate a comprehensive task map.
   • Unassisted Task Mining is another approach for Task Mining study that is useful when you want to find out what can be automated within a specific department/group of employees.
   • You can do so by capturing the actions that your team performs for a defined period of time in specified applications and then running the analysis of the captured data to receive potential automation opportunities.
2. Do I have to keep 2 desktop clients for TM projects?
   • Yes, the new Assisted Task Mining recorder can be used for ATM projects only. In case you want to capture the UTM projects, you have to install another desktop client recorder.
   • Note: it is not recommended to run the capturing in both recorders simultaneously
3. Can I use the Task Capture recorder for ATM projects?
   • No, Task Capture is a separate desktop application that is not connected to the Task Mining environment.
4. Can I capture my tasks with ATM and TM desktop recorders simultaneously?
   • No, it is not recommended to run the capturing in both recorders simultaneously
5. Is it possible to use Assisted Task Mining client to record a Citrix application?
   • It’s possible to capture Citrix applications. However, the generated selector quality, in this case, will be on a basic level and the screenshot will show the entire Citrix window, not the specific active application. We already have an item on our roadmap to improve this experience.
6. Can I open the UTM trace in the ATM project to edit it?
   • No, there is no connection between the UTM and ATM projects yet. In case you need to edit the UTM trace, please open it in the Task Capture.
7. Does the Assisted Task Mining desktop client work for Mac users?
   • As of now, the new desktop client works on Windows OS only.
8. What is a Cluster ID and why do I need it to merge the traces automatically?
   • After you capture the screenshots of the task, we logically group them into specific groups (clusters) to build the task map based on them. The cluster ID is a unique identifier generated for each cluster that is used by the ML algorithm during the auto-merging of the traces. Hence, when you build the diagram manually (or add a step manually), the cluster ID is not generated for those steps and they are not eligible for the auto-merge algorithm.
9. What is the optimal number of traces that I should collect in a project?
   • It is recommended to include up to 10 traces for the auto-merge experience. However, you can still capture more traces if there is a need for this.
10. Are there any limitations to the guided merge experience?
    • Yes, when you want to merge traces with a guided merge approach, you should select only 2 traces where one of them should be linear (without decision elements).
11. What types of business processes are ideal for Assisted Task Mining?
    • We can share some recommendations about the process requirements to receive better results, but we highly encourage you to share your feedback after you try out the feature!
      • We suggest capturing more linear processes or the ones that don’t contain a lot of branches
      • Be mindful in capturing the actions meaning that it is NOT the best practice to capture 5 traces containing 500 actions per trace :))
    • You’re welcome to start with capturing the similar processes that you used for Task Capture capturing or pick up some top ideas from the Automation Hub, or even try some corner cases that I described above if you have this need and share your feedback on the results.
12. Is Assisted Task Mining a separate paid feature of Task Mining?
    • No, there is no additional charging required to use Assisted Task Mining functionality.

Known issues

There are several issues we’re actively working on, please be aware of them when you test out the new capabilities.

Possible issues on the desktop recorder side:

1. Issue: The upload gets stuck with no error on the last action uploading
   Workaround: Wait for a few seconds (up to 5) before clicking “Stop Capture” after you captured the last action
2. Issue: When you sign out from the desktop client and then launch the recorder from the web after the capturing is done, the uploader shows 0 actions
   Workaround: Wait for a few more seconds (up to 5) before clicking “Stop Capture” after you captured the last action
3. Issue: The Preferences window crashes when the capturing is in progress
   Workaround: Please do not open the Preferences window during the capturing process.
4. Issue: The installation of a client gets stuck at the very beginning
   Workaround: Close the installer app and relaunch it
5. Issue: The launch of the desktop client on VM does not work
   Workaround: Close the desktop client by going to the Task Manager, delete the “%APPDATA%/UiPath Assisted Task Mining/test.sqlite3” file and restart the application

How to report an issue?

Is there something else we haven’t noticed yet?

Please report the issues here in the comments or DM, or by submitting the form.

Indicate as much information about the issue as possible to help us dive deeper into it asap.

• A short recording of you reproducing a bug is extremely valuable for us!
• Please also share the essential data about the issue:
  • full URL of the trace or project where the issue occurred. Just copy it from the browser URL panel. Example of the URL -
    https://cloud.uipath.com/AcmeOrganization/MainTenant/taskmining_/app/projects/tc/1234abc-def-5678?traceid=ghi-90123jklmn-4567op
  • logs from the desktop recorder client. You can find them by following these steps:
    • open the desktop client application, click on the user name icon in the top-right corner
    • select the “Preferences” option
    • go to the “Help” tab, click the “Save logs” button
    • choose a destination folder for the logs to be saved
    • attach the zip archive to your ticket

[Kaviyarasu_N]

Wow. Interesting features

[va13ps]

Good to know, thanks