I’m a big fan of applying technology where it makes sense. There’s massive interest in Chat GPT since it was released and people (myself included) have had a great time asking it questions. I have also seen some early adopters try to shoehorn it into their products but all they’re doing is putting their product UI over the Generative AI (GAI) engines. That’s not a very useful application of the technology.
Nintex takes a balanced approach to AI. We need to apply it where it makes sense and we also need to apply it responsibly. One example where GAI makes a significant difference to building applications on the Nintex platform is the newly released AI forms builder.
Prior to the AI forms builder, our options to build forms were to think about the fields that need to be on a form and then use the drag and drop interface to add and configure them. It’s fast and efficient. If you have existing forms, you can use our PDF import function. You save a picture of your existing forms in pdf format and the importer will analyse the picture, identify the different field names and field types and bring that into the drop and drop designer.
Now we have the AI forms builder where a forms designer simply has to describe the form they want to build and it will do the thinking for you and come up with suggestions. My touch rugby season is about to begin so as an example, I’ll create a Touch Rugby registration form that our organisers could use for people to register a new team.
I go into the forms designer and select the Start with AI option and then type a description of the form that I want. In this case I’ll write “Touch rugby registration form” but if you want better results, I’d recommend you use a more detailed description. However, I like to push boundaries so let’s see what we get with that really simple description.
I hit the Generate button and here’s where the magic happens. We’re sending that description to the Azure Open AI service and in the background we’re also telling it how to compose one of our forms programatically. It has a think and then comes back with its suggested form.
Not bad indeed! It has created a section a section about the team captain and emergency contact details and a section about the team. It’s even created an “Accept T&C’s” at the end of the form.
There are a few things that I’d like to tweak at this stage though. I don’t really need to provide the team captain’s date of birth so I’ll hit the trash can next to that field and I’d also like to change the emergency contact relationship status field from text to a drop down list so I make those changes on the left.
Now when I hit the apply changes button, I get this:
Wow! This is really doing a lot of the thinking for me and saving me a ton of time! There’s more I can extract from the generator though as it’s taking into account all the changes I’ve made to the suggestions so so if I hit the “Refresh suggestions” suggestions button, it should come up with other ideas for me. Let’s see what it comes up:
Pretty cool. It’s still suggesting the date of birth field (it must really like birthdays). I’ll ignore that suggestion but I like the idea of adding the experience field to the form so I ask it to be a choice field and hit the plus button. The forms builder is smart enough to come up with reasonable choices and smart enough to add that field to the section about the team rather than just at the end of the form.
I’m very happy with this output so now it’s time to accept the suggested form and return to our familiar form design canvas where I can tweak to my heart’s content. It has even filled in the placeholder and custom required text for me.
Go and give it a whirl in your tenants - the beta is available to everyone. Please note that as of this article publication date (Sep 2023), it is still a beta feature so please check out the T&C’s associated with the beta which may be found here in our help documentation.
Oh yeah. If you don’t want your form to be in English, just tell it which language you’d prefer and it will create the form in that language. Multi-lingual forms is something else that we’re working on - stay tuned to this channel for more on that shortly ;)
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