Now Assist and Accessibility

Release version: Nofamily

Updated May 15, 2026

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Summary of Now Assist and Accessibility

Now Assist leverages ServiceNow’s domain-specific generative AI to enhance user productivity through conversational and proactive experiences integrated directly into workflows across IT Service Management, Customer Service Management, HR, and creator tools. It enables users to access intelligent assistance without leaving their current interface, simplifying complex tasks and improving efficiency.

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Accessibility is a core focus of Now Assist, designed to reduce cognitive load, support diverse input methods, and make tasks easier for users with varying needs, including those with mobility, vision, or cognitive challenges.

Key Features

Now Assist Panel: Provides a conversational AI interface to help users summarize chats, cases, or incidents, generate resolution notes, and get contextual assistance without leaving their workspace.
Now Assist Context Menu: Offers generative AI-powered options for agents to summarize, create, and edit written content directly from the context menu, including email recommendations, knowledge base article generation, and custom skill deployment with usage dashboards.
Voice Input for Now Assist: Enables hands-free interaction with the Now Assist panel via voice commands. This feature supports users with dexterity limitations, low vision, neurodivergence, or those preferring speech-driven interfaces. It is configurable by system administrators and user preferences.
Smart Documents Skill: Supports cognitive accessibility by summarizing documents, generating interactive Q&A, and providing common questions and answers to help users quickly understand complex or lengthy content within workflows.
ServiceNow AI Lens: Automates data extraction and form filling by scanning images, handwritten notes, or documents. It can fill forms (like expense submissions), identify information in diagrams, search within images (such as legal contracts), and batch process multiple images to streamline manual data entry.

Accessibility Enhancements

Now Assist integrates with ServiceNow’s Next Experience accessibility preferences, including keyboard support, dark theme, and focus indicators, creating a more inclusive environment. Voice input and Smart Documents skills are key components that reduce cognitive effort and support multiple input preferences, making ServiceNow workflows more accessible to a broad range of users.

Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

Increase efficiency by accessing AI assistance directly within existing workflows.
Support diverse user needs and improve usability through voice interaction and accessibility features.
Simplify understanding of complex documents and accelerate task completion with AI-driven summarization and Q&A.
Automate data entry from images and handwritten content, reducing manual workload and errors.
Enhance agent productivity with AI-powered content generation and editing tools embedded in daily tasks.

Now Assist, the generative AI capabilities from ServiceNow, helps users work more efficiently through conversational and proactive experiences. Its capabilities can also support accessibility by reducing cognitive load, offering alternative input methods, and simplifying complex tasks for a broad range of users.

How Now Assist Works

Built on domain‑specific large language models, Now Assist integrates directly into user experiences across IT Service Management, Customer Service Management, HR workflows, and creator tools. Users can access intelligent assistance without leaving the interface where their work takes place.

Now Assist delivers its AI capabilities through modular skills—such as summarization, content generation, recommendations, and conversational assistance—embedded into platform experiences and applications.

Accessibility and Now Assist

Many capabilities in Now Assist align with accessibility guidelines, helping reduce cognitive load, supporting multiple input preferences, and making complex tasks easier to complete. Standard platform features—such as Next Experience accessibility preferences, keyboard support, dark theme, and focus indicators—combine with AI‑powered assistance to improve usability for diverse needs.

A key accessibility enhancement is the ability to interact with the Now Assist panel using voice input, enabling hands‑free prompts and navigation. Voice input supports users with mobility or dexterity limitations, blind or low‑vision users, neurodivergent users, and anyone who prefers speech‑driven interaction. Voice input can be enabled by system administrators and turned on in a user's personal Next Experience accessibility preferences. See the accessibility user preference document Enable Voice input for Now Assist Panel for more information.

Another capability that supports cognitive accessibility is the Smart Documents skill, which can summarize content, generate questions and answers, and produce common questions and answers—helping readers understand materials quickly without parsing long or complex text. See the Now Assist Smart Documents skill page for more information.

The following table provides links to more resources and information about Now Assist.

Table 1. Now Assist Features
Feature	Description
Now Assist	Now Assist uses generative AI to enhance user productivity and efficiency through conversation and proactive experiences.
Now Assist panel	With the Now Assist panel, you can get assistance from generative AI experiences to solve customer issues. Use this conversational interface to summarize a chat, case, or incident, get help, or generate resolution notes so that you can get the context of this information.
Now Assist context menu	The Now Assist context menu uses generative AI to help agents summarize, create, and edit written content. Email recommendations using the Now Assist context menu Summarize records with the Now Assist context menu Improve Docs content in Strategic Portfolio Management with Now Assist context menu Generate KB article with Now Assist context menu Now Assist context menu usage dashboard Use Now Assist context menu for custom skill deployment
Voice Input for Now Assist	Give users the option to use their voice when interacting with the Now Assist panel to make the panel more accessible. Voice input enables you to use the panel without a keyboard. See also, Enable Voice input for Now Assist Panel, which describes the accessibility user preference.
Smart Documents skill	The Smart Documents skill provides a concise summary of the document associated with a workflow, along with interactive Q&A and common questions and answers, enabling you to understand the content quickly, explore key insights, and get answers to specific questions. You can summarize a document in a workspace, ask interactive questions, and view common questions and answers. To learn how, see Generate summary and ask questions using Now Assist in Document Management.
ServiceNow AI Lens	ServiceNow AI Lens can automatically do the following tasks: Fill in a form. ServiceNow AI Lens can scan and extract the visual data to auto-fill in your forms. For example, it can scan the invoice receipt to auto-fill the fields on the expense submission form. Scan and identify the information from handwritten notes or images. For example, ServiceNow AI Lens can scan a sequence diagram to generate a script. Search for specific information from images. For example, ServiceNow AI Lens can search for a specific clause in a scanned legal contract. Batch process multiple images at once. For example, ServiceNow AI Lens can extract the data from multiple screenshots of a Microsoft Excel file.