Automator 4.15: Logs, GPT-4, Charitable & MS Teams

It’s here! Uncanny Automator 4.15, our free no-code automation plugin, is now available for download. The final release of the Automator 4.x series, it’s also the biggest, packing in multiple new integrations and huge new features. This is just the free version too; wait until you see what’s in Pro!

Important: As this is a very big release, we recommend trying it out on a Staging site first. It’s the first such recommendation we have made in over a year, so you know it’s a big one.

Logs

Can logs really be our #1 new feature in Automator 4.15? Yes, yes they can. While our earlier log system was already class-leading, 4.15 represents months of work and a huge step forward. Here’s what they look like:

So what’s new here? Let’s go through the list:

• All triggers, conditions and actions are shown: You can see what ran, what didn’t run, which conditions were met, which conditions weren’t met, it’s all there. It even shows what actions haven’t run yet (because of scheduling or delays) so you can understand the current recipe state.
• Preview emails and HTML content: Want to see exactly what the email looked like and contained that went out to a user in a recipe run? Now you can preview it in a new window.
• Action retries: Instead of just seeing the option to “resend” data for an action, now you can see details about each retry attempt, including what data was used. In future we’ll even add API responses.
• Downloadable entries: You can download recipe run details, send them to support when you have an issue, and we’ll be able to see exactly how the recipe is set up and what happened during the run attempt. This will help with troubleshooting.
• Reload data without a page refresh: Recipe run data can be refreshed dynamically without reloading the page. The reasons for this will be more obvious in the 5.0 release. 😀

The log overhaul was originally planned for our 5.0 release, but we moved them up to 4.15 because they allow Automator to start collecting data that can be used when 5.0 is released in approximately 6 weeks.

Note: Yes, to make some of these new features possible, the logs do store more data in Automator 4.15 and later. For most recipes it’s not much extra data, but we will remind users that if you have thousands of daily recipe runs, our pruning tools are available to keep everything manageable.

OpenAI: GPT-4 8k support and new actions

Our OpenAI and GPT support has seen incredible usage growth, and with the Automator 4.15 release, we’re increasing its capabilities in a big way.

First, we now support the GPT-4 model in actions. Please note that your OpenAI API account must have access to the GPT-4 API. Automator runs a quick check when the connection is made, and if we don’t detect that you have GPT-4 access (which is still limited and not available to the public), we won’t show the new model and actions.

For full control over the GPT-4 model, you can use the existing “Use a prompt to generate text with the GPT model”. If you have GPT-4 access, it will look like this in the action:

For easier GPT-4 usage, we created a number of new dedicated actions that simplify usage for common requests. For users that don’t want to play around with temperature, tokens and system messages, you’ll like these. Here’s what’s new:

• Analyze sentiment
• Correct spelling and grammar
• Create a list of links that might help to resolve a customer request
• Generate a meta description
• Generate an SEO title
• Generate an excerpt suitable for Instagram
• Generate an excerpt suitable for Twitter
• Generate an excerpt
• Translate text

Certainly these new actions open a world of new use cases. Maybe you give incoming requests that are negative a higher priority based on sentiment analysis, and when you publish new blog posts, you can have OpenAI generate excerpts and publish summaries to social media and email campaigns.

The new actions may have a few settings, depending on what’s needed to run the action. Here’s an example where we take the details provided by a customer in a support ticket and generate a summary that’s added to the ticket for easier triage:

Finally, Prompts in OpenAI fields now fully support HTML.

New integration: Charitable

Yes, Uncanny Automator 4.15 has 2 new integrations as well. The first, Charitable, is a popular donations and fundraising platform for WordPress, boasting a 4.9/5 average review score. In this integration introduction, we added support for 3 triggers:

• A donation is made
• A user makes a donation

These new triggers enable recipes like adding a contact to a static list when a donation is made, adding users to a MemberPress membership level or BuddyBoss social group when a donation of over $500 is made, etc.

New integration: Microsoft Teams

Yes, you can now use Uncanny Automator to send messages, create channels and create teams with MS Teams. Consider this one a “beta” release, as the app itself hasn’t been officially approved by Microsoft.

Important: This integration can only be used by “work” accounts and organizations. Personal accounts will not work, and the app itself must be connected by an organization’s administrator. These limitations are set by Microsoft.

Here are the actions we support in the new release:

• Create a channel in a team
• Create a team
• Send a direct message to a team member
• Send a message to a channel

Perhaps you combine it with our Charitable integration and have a message sent to an onboarding team in Microsoft Teams when a user makes a donation of over $500, or maybe when a form is submitted, you pass the contents through OpenAI to get a summary, then you send the summary and a link to the form entry to a specific user in MS Teams.

New LearnDash Quiz tokens

This is yet another huge addition, and it’s all in the free version. Here’s the complete set of new tokens (in addition to the existing ones) available for LearnDash quiz triggers:

• Quiz time spent
• Quiz score
• Quiz points scored
• Quiz number of correct answers
• Quiz category scores
• Quiz questions and answers (combined, formatted)
• Quiz questions and answers (combined, unformatted)
• Quiz questions and answers (each individual question and answer token when a specific quiz is selected)

We can’t count the number of times we’ve had requests from LearnDash users (for our LearnDash plugins) asking for a better way to export or report on quiz answers, or an alternative to LearnDash Notifications that has additional options and dynamic data. These are the types of things these new tokens allow. Send users a copy of the questions and their answers when they submit a quiz. Pass quiz records over to Google Sheets, where each answers is in a column and each quiz entry is in a row, for easy analysis of quiz records.

For a lot of LearnDash sites, these new tokens will open up a world of capabilities and eliminate the need for custom development.

Other new triggers and actions

Yes, there’s still lots more to share in the Automator 4.15 release.

MemberPress gains one new trigger: A user renews a recurring subscription product. Maybe on renewal they’re awarded credit, have access for a course extended, or get sent an offer for another product after the 6th successful renewal.

Groundhogg gets a “Create or update a contact” action that will make it easier to target contacts without worrying about whether the contact exists or is new.

New tokens

Besides the new LearnDash tokens, our Uncanny Toolkit Pro plugin gets 2 new tokens:

• Course cumulative time
• Course time at completion

These new tokens are available when our Simple Course Timer module is enabled and output time data when a course can be targeted via a LearnDash course trigger.

WooCommerce gets tokens for “payment URL” and “direct checkout URL”. Want to create a manual order for someone and have it instantly sent to them with a payment link? That’s the type of thing these new tokens are for.

Other enhancements

Here are some other key improvements in the Automator 4.15 release:

• The “Create a post” action in the WordPress Core integration adds a drop-down so you can select a “parent” post.
• Twitter actions gain improved error messaging so it’s easier to trace action failures in the logs.
• When mapping a Zoom Webinar in an action, a token selection is now available to dynamically pass in a webinar identifier.

For a full list of changes, make sure to check out the changelog. Stay tuned for the Pro release, with even more integrations and our new Formatter tool!