UiPath announced its latest release with some fanfare.
It sure was a lot of marketing and hype for most features that were already announced at their last Forward III. To add to that, most of the features are still in beta or in preview.
The latest 20.4 Stable Release which is also called UiPath “Mr. Robot” apparently “to deliver a Robot for Everyone and make Attended Automation the central focus point.” does have some interesting adds.
Most of the interesting features did not come out clearly though due to the marketing messages like “Industry’s First End-to-End Hyperautomation Platform” – whatever that means.
So, here is my summary of the three good feature additions that I could see:
- Test Suite: This adds Application testing and RPA Testing within UiPath. Now you can test your applications with the new “Test Automation” project. You can also test your RPA Workflows using the new “RPA Testing” feature. This is available as part of Studio Pro license – Yes another new license! 🤦
- Improved Attended automation: They are working on a Picture-in-Picture (experimental) feature wherein you can continue to do other work on your desktop while the bot is running. Also, there is a new UiPath Assistant that allows you to schedule reminders for running attended automation 🙂
- UiPath Document Understanding AI: A beta version of IntelligentOCR for document processing. UiPath is late on this behind Automation Anywhere IQ Bot and Blue Prism Decipher (which unfortunately has not seen the light of the day much yet).
A few more notable features which you can explore on the community forum here.
- Improved UI automation framework (UI Automation Next), now in preview
- New SAP-specific activities
- Computer Vision Activities
- New Mobile Device Automation platform, supporting ~98% of Smartphones or smart devices
- IntelligentOCR package (Beta) for Document Processing.
- UiPath chatbot connector w/ Google Dialogflow: NLP intent mapping to processes
I have been asking this week if the top 3 RPA vendors are losing their way a bit. Just look at the last six months for them:
- ~6 months back: UiPath laid off 400 employees.
- Last month BluePrism CEO stepped down.
- Last Week, Automation Anywhere laid off 10% of the workforce.
During this same timeframe, Microsoft came up with a powerful Automation Platform!
I am sure UiPath is still on the path that Daniel Dines set out “let’s build the best thing that we can and then we’ll see what happens.”. It is probably stretching itself a bit too thin though with too many directions in the name of Hyperautomation.