Today IBM announced the general availability of the API Assistant feature in IBM API Connect, our market-leading and award-winning API management platform. The API Assistant, powered by watsonx.ai, will help IBM API Connect users create better APIs faster through 2 new assistant capabilities:
1. Enhance your API documentation to improve API discovery, governance and consumption
The need to document APIs is not a new concept. However, with APIs now being consumed by both humans and AI, providing thorough documentation has never been more crucial. Well-documented APIs are essential for enabling consumers, whether human or AI, to efficiently discover, comprehend and reuse the various APIs across their organization. Moreover, well-structured documentation is fundamental to effective API governance, ensuring consistency, compliance and proper management of API usage across the enterprise.
The challenge is that writing high-quality API documentation is time-consuming and tedious. API developers would rather spend their time solving tough coding and integration challenges than writing detailed descriptions and examples in their API specifications.
This is where the API Assistant in IBM API Connect comes in. With just a couple clicks, the API Assistant reviews the API specification, identifies any gaps and suggests context-specific descriptions and examples to add within seconds. The developer can easily review and apply these recommendations, creating robust documentation and increasing API discoverability, consistency and adoption—both by humans and by other AI.
2. Accelerate API development and boost API reliability with intelligent error remediation
Every API should be fast, scalable and reliable. An important part of the development process is to identify and fix any errors and inconsistencies prior to deployment. But combing through the API specification to identify and debug those errors can be time-consuming. The API Assistant in IBM API Connect can help: it validates the API specification for errors and offers suggestions to remediate them within seconds. For example, the API Assistant can identify common validation errors, such as missing parameters, incorrect data types, duplicative lines of code and more. You can then review and apply any or all of the suggested fixes to quickly remediate the errors, shortening development time while improving code quality.