How to Deploy Amazon Translate Spoke in ServiceNow for Language Detection and Translation

By Sunil Bemarkar, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Sasson Jamshidi, Principal Inbound Product Manager – ServiceNow

ServiceNow

We often forget that not everyone speaks or reads the same language across the world. Even though there are a handful of countries that transact business and speak in English, they do so not as their primary language.

Successfully managing a business with a global workforce necessitates overcoming language barriers by utilizing AWS services such as Amazon Translate and Amazon Comprehend. These services enable the detection of languages and the dynamic translation of text into the native language of employees, streamlining communication across diverse linguistic backgrounds.

Global companies provide global services, and that often means bridging the language gap. The AWS Translate Spoke within ServiceNow Flow Designer provides an intuitive way of translating without the overhead of determining the source language in your workflows. This lets any department workflow in the right language for the right people.

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, affordable, and customizable language translation. It lets you localize content for diverse global users and translate and analyze large volumes of text to activate cross-lingual communication between users. You can also use Amazon Translate to translate unstructured text documents or to build applications that work in multiple languages.

Amazon Comprehend uses natural language processing (NLP) to extract insights about the content of documents. It develops insights by recognizing the entities, key phrases, language, sentiments, and other common elements in a document. Amazon Comprehend’s dominant language capability can examine documents and determine the dominant language for a far wider selection of languages.

ServiceNow is an AWS Partner and AWS Marketplace Seller that gives enterprises complete visibility of their entire IT environment, including virtualized and cloud infrastructure. ServiceNow also simplifies service mapping, delivery, and assurance, consolidating IT service and infrastructure data into a single system of record.

In this post, we will explain how the current release of the AWS Translate Spoke enables ServiceNow customers to begin using Amazon Translate in their custom workflows by demonstrating translation of the knowledge article field from default language to Spanish when a knowledge article is created in ServiceNow.

AWS Prerequisites

To deploy this solution, make sure that the following prerequisites have been completed.

• AWS account
• Make sure Amazon Translate and Amazon Comprehend services are available in your region

ServiceNow Prerequisites

• Admin-level access to your organization’s ServiceNow instance
• Request an Integration Hub subscription, as this lets you build reusable integrations with third-party systems and call them from anywhere in the ServiceNow platform.
• Download and activate the AWS Translate Spoke from the ServiceNow Store
• Role required: admin

Step 1: Create an Access Key

Create an access key for the required user in the AWS Management Console to authenticate requests from the ServiceNow instance:

• Log in to the AWS console and open the IAM console.
• In the navigation pane, click Users.
• Click the required user record for which you want to create or manage the access keys.
  • Ensure the user has admin access to Amazon Translate.
• Click the Security credentials tab.
• Under Access keys, click Create access key.
• Click Download .csv file to save the access key ID and secret access key to a CSV file. Record these values for later use. For more information, see Managing access keys (console).

Step 2: Create Credential Record

Create the credential record for the AWS Translate Spoke in ServiceNow. The AWS Translate Spoke uses this credential to perform actions on Amazon Translate.

• Log in to the ServiceNow console and navigate to Integration Hub > Connection & Credential Aliases.
• Open the record, AWS Translate.
• In the Credentials tab, click New. The system displays the message: What type of Credentials would you like to create?
• Select AWS Credentials. On the form, fill the following values.

• Click Submit. The credential record for the AWS Translate spoke is created.

Step 3: Create a Flow Action for Translating Knowledge Article

Create flow action to automate the translation of knowledge article from base language to Spanish.

• Log in to the ServiceNow console and navigate to All > Process Automation > Flow Designer.
• Click the Flows tab and select New Flow.
• Fill in the Flow Properties and click.
  

Figure 1 – Flow properties.

• In the Trigger section, add a trigger and select:
  • Updated value for Trigger field.
  • Knowledge [kb_knowledge] as value for Table.
  • Click Done.

Figure 2 – Trigger flow option details.

• In the Actions section, add an action and select:
  • AWS Translate > Translate Text from Installed Spokes.
  • us-east-1 for Region.
  • Set Auto to automatically detect language for the Source Language.
  • Trigger – Record updated > Knowledge Record > Article Body for Text.
  • Spanish for the Target Language.
  • Click Done.

Figure 3 – Flow action details.

• In the Actions section, add another action and select:
  • ServiceNow Core > Update Record from Installed Spokes.
  • Knowledge [kb_knowledge] as value for Table.
  • Trigger – Record Updated > Knowledge Record as value for Record.
  • In the Fields, select Article body and set its value to 1 – Translate Text > Translation > Translated Text.
  • Click Done.

Figure 4 – Trigger flow option details.

• Click the Save button to the save the flow action we have created so far.

Step 4: Testing the Flow Action

In this section, we’ll test our flow action.

• From the ServiceNow console, navigate to Self Service > My Knowledge Articles and open existing knowledge record and notice the language of Article Body is English.

Figure 5 – Knowledge articles.

• Navigate to All > Process Automation > Flow Designer.
• Click the Flows tab and select the TranslateKnowledge flow which we created in previous step.
• Click on the Test button.
• Select the same knowledge record we viewed in the first step of this testing section.

Figure 6 – Testing flow.

• Click Run Test and upon completion click on the link Your test has finished running. View the flow execution details.
• Upon successful completion, you should see Test Completed.

Figure 7 – Testing flow results.

• Now, we’ll verify the knowledge article which we submitted for testing has indeed converted the article body to Spanish, by navigating in the ServiceNow console to Self Service > My Knowledge Articles and opening the same knowledge record.
• Notice the language of Article Body is now converted to Spanish.

Figure 8 – Translated knowledge articles.

Conclusion

In this post, we showed how to create a flow action in ServiceNow by using the AWS Translate Spoke to translate knowledge articles body field from English into Spanish using Amazon Comprehend and Amazon Translate.

You can extend this setup in ServiceNow to different workflows as per your requirement by creating a copy of it in required scope. You can customize it to the language of your choice supported by Amazon Comprehend and Amazon Translate.

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