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Hi there,
You've probably noticed, with New York Virtual Agent got several enhancements. One of them is the "Anything else topic" functionality. New functionality that's not been mentioned that much. I'm writing this short article to explain how the "Anything else topic" works.
System settings
Navigating to "Collaboration > Virtual Agent > General Settings" brings you to the new "System settings" UI Page. The UI Page shows several Setup Topics which could be selected. Setup topics like a "Greetings topic", "Survey topic", etc.. One of them is the "Anything else topic". You might already notice… by default it's left blanc, while out-of-the-box there is a topic provided called (how appropriate) "Anything Else Topic".
Out-of-the-box look and feel
If a user ends a topic, for example the out-of-the-box "Open IT Topic", the topic configured as "Anything else topic" will be started. The out-of-the-box topic will basically provide the below question:
"Yes" will result in displaying the Topic Picker, so the user could start a new topic.
"No" will result in - if configured - starting the topic configured as "Survey topic".
Basically the flow is:
Topic picker > Selected topic > Anything else topic
No: Survey topic
- or -
Yes: Topic picker
Note: After the configured "Survey topic" (or if not configured), the chat will just end. This is different as Pre-New York where a new conversation would start immediately. You can still start a new conversation, though you have to do this manually thru the "+" sign on the top right, or the "Click here to start a new conversation" bar on the bottom.
How does the topic design look like
The canvas for the out-of-the-box "Anything Else Topic" looks pretty straight forward. Personally I don't see a reason to change this out-of-the-box topic. Where I usually say that out-of-the-box Virtual Agent topics should be seen as templates, this topic could be applied right away!
If you would like to change the messages within the out-of-the-box "Anything Else Topic", consider using UI Messages for this [sys_ui_message table]. Also for overwriting English phrases like "Is there anything else I can assist you with?". There's no need to change the topic for this. Just look if there is already an existing UI Message which could be updated or add a new one.
Need to know when building a custom topic
If you are planning to build custom topics, and wish to use the Anything else topic, is there anything to keep in mind? Anything need to know when building a custom topic?
Not in particular. Two things to note:
1) Don't mimic a "Send Topic Picker" step before the end step in your topic. The topic picker is already set up within the out-of-the-box "Anything Else Topic".
2) Within the Virtual Agent Designer, on the Topic Properties, don't forget to define the Category ("Setup Topics"). If you would leave this out, your topic won't be selectable on the System Settings Setup Topics section.
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Kind regards,
Mark Roethof
ServiceNow Technical Consultant @ Paphos Group
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Hi Mark, this is what's set up in my Setup Topics.
I am using "Personalized Greeting" Topic. I should mention that the error goes away when I use "Greeting" Topic. But if I use Personalized Greeting, then the "Anything Else" topic prompts right after the "How can I help you?" message.
Greetings Topic set up:
This is how it looks in the VA user interface:
Appreciate any insight.
Yasmin
This is how the out of the box "Personalized Greeting" looks like, and the script.
Compared to the "Greeting" setup topic, I can see that it's missing the "Send Topic Picker" portion on the flow, which may be why when using the OOTB "Personlized Greeting" set up topic it's sending the "Anything else" topic right after the personalized greeting? I don't know if this was done on purpose for us to figure it out?
I have duplicated the "Personalized Greeting" setup topic, added the "Send Topic Picker" copying the same script from the "Greeting" setup topic flow and it seems to have solved it 🙂
By the way, thanks for sharing the article on changing the size of the web widget of the VA UI. Yes, it was me asking about resizing the chat web widget.
Hey Mark
we have a new requirement to integrate our own translation api into virtual agent. Basically we want to do language translation in virtual agent.
This is what we already accomplished in connect and queue chat. As you can see in below screenshot agent sends something in English and it get translated to user's(Abel tuter) default language which is German in this case.
In connect/queue chat we have written business rules to fetch the chat messages from live_message table and sent it to our Translation API for translation then whatever the response we receive from API will get stored into same table as formatted message column.
this is exactly what we want to do in virtual agent.
Does virtual agent conversation(user chats and bot response) with user gets store anywhere? So that I could write business rule to fetch the chat messages and sent it out to our translation API for translations.
I found out that the conversation is stored in sys_cs_message table as you can see in below screenshot. But it seems the message is encrypted.
Also, I have gone through Virtual agent localization docs but it wasn't much helpful . https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/orlando-performance-analytics-and-reporting/page/administer/virtu...
any help would be much appreciated!!!!!
Many thanks!!!!
Regards,
Nikhil
