V‑Spark Version 3.4.1 provides performance, usability, and stability improvements, and also provides significant API enhancements.

1. Call Tagging - makes it easy to identify specific transcriptions or the results of previous searches by enabling you to apply a tag (a logical label) to them and then subsequently search for transcriptions that are associated with that tag

2. User management enhancements - more granular permissions and a substantially enhanced GUI simplify setting new and existing permissions and associated roles. These user management improvements are also reflected in the updated REST API, as described later in this section.

   If you are upgrading from a previous release of V‑Spark, existing user permissions will be converted into those that work with the new permissions model, as shown in the following table:

   Table 1. Mapping Between pre-3.4 and 3.4 Permissions

   Pre-3.4 Permission/Role	3.4 Permission/Role
   Admin	System admin
   Manager	Create/Edit rights on all organizations that they had been given access to within the company under which their account was created (their home company). View rights on any other organization that they had access to
   User	View rights on any organization that they had access to

3. RESTful API - Phase 2 - significant API enhancements make it easier to deploy and manage V‑Spark programmatically:

   1. Enhanced user permissions provide easier delegation of administrative responsibilities within a V‑Spark deployment and increase data privacy by separating administrative roles from the ability to view data

   2. API access to daily overview and agent application statistics makes it easier to extract reports and use extracted data in third-party reporting applications

   3. Applications can now be created and modified programmatically, making it even easier to use, customize, and deploy applications from templates or simply from outside the V‑Spark environment

4. Expanded email configuration for partners - Email templates and improved configuration files make it easy for partners to customize system email sender and content

5. Trending support is disabled - terminology trend tracking and analysis is now disabled by default, based on its limited use, capabilities, and impact on system performance. We have decided that it needs additional development in order to perform as originally envisioned. At this point in time, this additional development is not a line item in our development plans. The current implementation and of tracking and analyzing terminology trends can be re-enabled by an administrator who has access to the V‑Spark installation, by modifying the V‑Spark configuration file. Re-enabling the current implementation of trending support is not recommended.

6. End of day prediction for call volume (also referred to as "predicted overall volume") is no longer performed.

7. Company modification via API requires root token - a company authentication token does not provide sufficient privileges to modify a company itself.

This section identifies fixes that were introduced in patch releases and hot fixes since the original 3.4.1 release, and are therefore now included in the latest version of the 3.4.1 release. Maintenance versions and associated fixes are listed from earliest to most recent:

1. Files scored during upload had incorrect summaries of average call duration and silence (3.4.1-1) - Previously, the average call duration and silence time in the Agent Summary table were calculated using only the files that had scored. Now these averages are calculated based on all of an agent's calls.

2. Audio player controls now visible in in the Chrome browser (3.4.1-2) - Chrome Version 63.0.3239.84 changed how the built-in audio player was invoked, causing player controls not to be displayed. This was fixed in V‑Spark and in later versions of Chrome.

3. Enabled Client metadata fields as valid search parameters in /search API (3.4.1-2) - Searching for Client metadata fields in /search API was not previously supported.

4. API /search for exclude phrase are now supported (3.4.1-4) - Previously, no results were returned for API searches with exclude phrases.

5. setupHostname error (3.4.1-4) - Prior to this, configuration files without a hostname specified could cause an error.

6. Added support for tag search with | or & in a single term (3.4.1-4) - Tag searches that included boolean operators in a single term previously did not return results.

7. Agent/Client gender and clarity now default to null when speaker does not exist (3.4.1-4) - In data uploaded prior to this change, Agent/Client gender defaulted to female and Agent/Client clarity defaulted to 0.0 when the speaker did not exist, such as in calls with only one speaker.

8. Improved startup procedures to avoid licensing timing issues.

9. Updating a company requires the root token (3.4.1-6) - Previous releases in the 3.4 family allowed companies to be updated by API calls that used the company token for authorization. This has been corrected so that the root token is required for company updates, while the company token can be used to update related organizations and associated users.

10. Custom metadata is displayed regardless of the case specified in folder (3.4.1-7) - Previously, only custom metadata that matched the case specified in the folder were displayed.

The following upcoming changes to V‑Spark are being announced. These changes are not present in V‑Spark 3.4.1, but you should review your use of V‑Spark and prepare for changes to these aspects of its use:

1. In application scoring searches, the underscore character (' _ '), a wildcard matching 0 or more words, and the ' --> ' character combination, matching phrases in consecutive speaker turns, are being deprecated in favor of the ' ~n ' (search for phrases appearing up to n words apart) and ' ~t ' (search for phrases appearing within the same speaker turn) expressions.

1. Issues with Dashboard Displays

   • Files uploaded to a folder that is linked to a disabled application or that have not been reprocessed will still appear in the Files View on the application dashboard

2. Issues with Search

   • Time-based search

     • Searches are turn-based and may return results for phrases that are outside of the requested timeframe if those phrases are within the same speaker turn

     • Ad-hoc Search snippets in the Files View may display results outside the specified time interval

   • Exceptions to standard File Details highlighting:

     • Searches using (~n) may highlight phrases with the specified number of words in between each of the search terms, rather than between all of the search terms. For example, "get help phone ~4" may highlight phrases with 4 words between "get" and "help" and another 4 words between "help" and "phone". Searches using (~t) and (~n) will only be highlighted if the words matched appear in the order specified in the search tag.

     • Highlighting may be incomplete for matches marked with emotion

     • Highlighting may be incomplete for matches with intervening silence tags greater than 2 seconds

     • Matches for "@*" (such as when searching for email addresses) will only be highlighted until the first "." in the email address. Regular expression searches may be used to circumvent this issue.

     • Excluded application search phrases may be highlighted on the File Details page. Note that these exceptions only affect highlighting, and that all search results using the above characters will still be accurate.

3. Other

   • Users playing longer audio files via Firefox may encounter playback/syncing issues when jumping to different sections of the transcript. This is an external issue caused by the Firefox browser. Users who encounter this issue can simply wait for the browser to finish buffering the file before resuming their search.