Can I send emails from ROVO

[Sai Nadha Ghanta]

I would like to create boards assign tickets and send mails to team members where they will open their ticket update their status, then ROVO will consolidate and send the reporter a mail with the details. Can we trigger mails to outlook from ROVO?

[Alex Gallien]

There are no skills currently that handle the creation of emails. The workaround @Dwight Holman proposed is solid though! If you did want a skill that could be invoked directly from Rovo chat you'd have to build that out in Forge.

[Dwight Holman]

Thanks @Alex Gallien - do Atlassian have any plans to add a skill for emails?

[Alex Gallien]

Turns out I was wrong! There is a beta skill now for Send Email from Gmail and Send Email from Outlook. Seems like they are still in development but I'd give them a try.

[Dwight Holman]

I've been trying the same kind of thing during the last couple of weeks and am currently stuck.

The Rovo Agent part mostly works - but is limited by what JQL can do. This can limit what Rovo can get out of Jira. Using ScriptRunner I have worked-around that.

Now I'm stuck with the sending email part. The approach I'm trying is to create an automation rule that:

• Can be run on a schedule
• Initiates the Rovo request
• Gets the {{agentResponse}} 
• Sends a customised HTML email including the agent response

As far as the documentation says this should work and it kinda does.

https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/automation-smart-values-rovo-agents/

The Rovo output is nicely formatted with lists and stuff, and we want this to be sent in the email. Sadly, by default the SmartValue seems to return plain text only. Maybe this would be ok for your use-case.

There does not seem to be a good way to convert the agent output into HTML. Has anyone else figured out how to do this?

I'm currently waiting for Atlassian Support to advise. 

[Alex Gallien]

@Dwight Holman I don't think there is any way of converting {{agentResponse}} to HTML directly, I tried {{agentResponse.wiki.html}} as you can do that to other wiki markup fields like {{issue.description.html}}, but it didn't work.

That being said, why not have Rovo do the conversion for you when you prompt it in your automation rule? I just tested it out and it worked for me! The phrase without any additional formatting or commentary is key to ensure it's just the HTML being returned.

[Dwight Holman]

@Alex Gallien - thanks for the suggestion. Didn't occur to me to try. Indeed it does work but:

1. The resulting email had a large amount of whitespace. To the point it was not really usable. I'll experiment some more to see if I can get it to generate better HTML.
2. This means the agent could not be used interactively. Might not be workable for everyone.

[Alex Gallien]

1. Interesting, if you render the HTML it generates yourself does it behave the same way? You most likely could convince Rovo to get you something more concise if not - just asking it to minimize whitespace should be enough but I'd have to play with it a bit to be sure. Curious what you find!
2. That's where scenarios come in! While this doesn't solve for the fact that Rovo doesn't have a Send Email skill, you could isolate the HTML email generating functionality to a separate scenario. The way I typically do this is by having a trigger that fires when the prompt is prefixed with AUTOMATION - here is an example of a similar trigger from a triage automation agent:
   

   When the query begins with AUTOMATION, use this scenario.
   
   ## Positive Examples
   "AUTOMATION Analyze this issue"
   "AUTOMATION Triage ABC-123"
   
   ## Negative Examples
   "Analyze this issue"
   "How can I use this agent?"

   
   that way you can isolate the conversational and automation scenarios and have the best of both worlds. Check out the JSM Triage or Onboarding Buddy agents in my team's workshop series for some more detailed examples of this. The materials section in the webinar has a link to the prompts and instructions.

[Jack Brickey]

Hi @Sai Nadha Ghanta , welcome to the Community! Are you using Jira or JSM for tickets here? Both of those will notify the Reporter as well as Watchers/Participants when work items (tickets) are updated.can you elaborate on where Rovo is involved here?