good morning good afternoon wherever you are in the world welcome to virtual engagement academy thank you for joining let's get started so as always before getting started i want to share with you to visit us in the virtual agent nlu community uh there you'll find all the latest uh guidance and tips about virtual agent and nlu also be sure to uh if you have any questions be sure to ask questions there and give answers all of you by now as i've said are experts so hopefully you're in there answering questions from those uh new to va to virtual agent and uh you know check out the latest things that we've written there if you're watching in youtube and you like what you're seeing feel free to click that like and subscribe button all our uh virtual academies are recorded and all of them are posted to youtube within the week so feel free to check out all our passwords in academies share them with your colleagues or watch them if you want to do any review announcement knowledge is coming both digital and live so quickly uh be sure to grab a seat whether virtual or live you can register at knowledge.org now dot com uh i for one will be at the hague knowledge may 11th and 12th and las vegas in may 25th and 26th so come find me and say hello um some other folks you may see a knowledge including marcel who's also on the call as well as nabil and paul and all the folks you may have seen and heard in in virtualization academy you they may be there as well so uh you will you'll see a lot of us so again come find us and say hello and check out uh not only virtual agent but also all the other cool things you'll still see a knowledge all right so today's uh topic will be how to launch your virtual agent with different experiences so of course we're all used to and we all know by now how to launch your virtual agent with greetings right hopefully you're using the dynamic greetings which which is more personable than what's out of box but we're going to switch things up a bit in terms of how to launch virtual agent and you know maybe fulfill some use case that you all have so uh there's no overview slide today we're gonna go straight to uh to ju to exercise building and configuration these are the things we're gonna do today we're gonna first show how to get rid of the show me everything top show me everything button that question comes up every so often we're going to show how to go directly to a live agent so maybe you don't want to start with a chat bot you want to go jump directly to an agent how to jump directly to a specific topic and then how to use a skip load history to basically clear your history and you know start uh your virtualization with a clean slate so we're going to go through all of that today now so i'm going to jump out of my slide and goes to my instance so this is my san diego instance and i'm gonna first show you how to create a greeting that does not have the show me everything button so as you all know in ingredients show them everything shows you all the possible topics and you may not want that maybe you have too many topics you just don't want folks to see what topics you've configured right your end users so let me show you what this looks like and hopefully i'm sharing my desktop so let me know in the chat or marcel let me know if you do not see my pop-up virtual agent uh um pop-up for my tester but you can see right now that uh it says hello vincent what can i help you with but as you see there's no show of everything but when i say oh i want to look up you know email issues for instance they'll jump straight to my email topic right so how did that how did i build this so let's go ahead and create a new topic and i'm going to call it no show greetings 2. okay now i'm going to make this a setup topic okay and the reason why i'm going to do that is because this is going to be a topic this is going to be a greetings topic effectively and if i want to use it as a greeting topic then it needs to be a setup topic not just any other regular topic right so the first i'm going to do is is greet the user by their name and in order to do that i do need a script block and i'm just going to basically let's see you know call this um you know hello first name right and i'm basically going to copy and paste from the dynamic readings topic and i've got it off to the side so i'm just going to do some copy and paste but you're going to kind of it's going to make a lot of sense basically right so you declare a single out message and then you're going to declare variable user first name gs.getuser.getfirstname and basically you're going to output a single out message settextpart hello space plus user uh first name plus exclamation point period uh whatever okay so hopefully this makes sense to you and it's just some concatenation within this output and then you can return single out message okay so now i've got hello first name now i'm gonna insert a text input okay i'm gonna say call this input query right and my problem's going to be the same as like please let me know what you know i can help you with right and what i like to do in my greetings is provide some examples of what to what to tell the user to type because you know we usually get a lot of problems or not problems but people either type things too short or type things way too long it's like they they have an entire sentence of what what they want so we're going to provide to you some examples so like you know request zoom access or having email issues right i'm giving them examples i do not need to enable nlu to switch topics i don't need to enable it on the nlu in any greetings ever uh topic discovery handles that for us okay so this that's the prompt so you're just going to type and then what i'm going to do is run a topic discovery based on what they type so i'll just call this topic discovery you can see i've obviously typed this before and the script here is very simple uh well you know this you see some examples of single outputs and multi-out messaging we used this earlier that we can delete all this and essentially the function you want to call is vase system and this is all documented in in documentation dot topic discovery and i'm going to run top discovery on what exactly i'm going to run it on the input that the user just typed in right so va inputs dot and of course it's a user which is username but the one we really want to use is input query okay so this is basically saying hey run topic discovery which is the same thing that all our out of box dynamics runs on whatever the person typed in up above right click save and we're done i'm me save this give it a test make sure i don't have any misspellings and you can see here it's going to say hello vincent vincent is the first name of the admin what i can help you with and you have you can say something like i'll say having email issues and it'll run top discoveries jump straight to the topic just like before so that is how you create a greeting without showing everything just using topic discovery method and then the final step is to actually add this as part of your greeting so to do that we are going to go to the conversational homepage now this is new in san diego so this is an excuse for me to show you uh this new interface so this is how you set up greetings and branding in san diego so in here i will set up greetings go to the default chat experience get a set of topics and you know if of course if you've used quebec and rome this all looks familiar to you in terms of custom ingredients of setup just slightly different ui right and for greeting it's currently set to dynamic reading topic i'll click on greeting and i will replace this with my no show where is it there oh there's oh you know what i should publish my uh topic my no-show greeting topic uh-oh where'd it go let me refresh this is a different tab that's probably why it doesn't have it yeah victor while you're pulling that up i put a documentation link in the chat for some different scripts and variables that you can get familiar with a virtual agent thanks marcel so yeah so um that documentation was actually recently upgraded uh updated as of earlier well as of last month in fact and uh we've added more methods including topic discovery i know that that uh va scripts was a little documentation was a little sparse uh back in the days but we really fleshed it out and we're going to continue to flush it out so stay tuned for that okay so i published that i'm just going to go i don't know i'll try to re i'll try to refresh maybe that'll work there it is no show greetings to click save and then hop back to uh the home here and i have a va tester straight in my ci home page click try my butt and voila here's my no-show greetings give it a run there we go um so some of you may ask well how did i jump straight to this topic because sometimes you may recall like it'll ask me like um hey are you sure you are or is this what you mean etc and you know that may be a bit too jarring or maybe a bit too on the nose you can change that and as a reminder that's in the nlu settings here so i'll show you where it is in the san diego state homepage so under nlu you click view settings and you can see uh i i've turned that off ask user if the topic of v8 chose is correct now it is usually good practice to turn this on especially in the early days because we the nlu engine does use this information to train um its uh its intelligence right for better for worse but just for a better user experience i turn this off so that if it's you know you saw email issues like a 94 confidence don't need to ask people right so that is topics as a greeting without shum or everything so um you know using a bit of elements from dynamic reading and plus some type of discovery and there you have it so now let's so let me show you what it looks like in service portal and then we're going to do something a little different we're going to talk about live agent right so this is what it looks like in service portal now that i've configured it to no show greetings that's what it is but let's say i'm in employee center and maybe i don't have any maybe in my employ center my hr service desk doesn't have virtual agents set up yet so you know i i don't want to show iot topics in fact i don't want to show um hr topic or i'm sorry um chatbot oh i just if you're in hr please send them straight to a live agent right how do i do that let's show you so i'm going to go back here and i am going to go to um the service portal agent chat configuration page um you'll see what you'll see what it looks like in a moment you've all seen that before despite the name so um inside home page i'm going to select a portal i've got these two right i'm going to select employ center and click on view settings and this should probably all look familiar to you right uh we've config we've been here before for service portal this time this is for employee center and you'll see here live agent only sys parameter is set to basically uh false uh is the opposite of this va active with some fancy computer science there but we're going to set this straight up to true okay and what this is going to do is the next time this thing in ec employ center chat client runs it's going to go straight to a live agent simple as that so i'm going to save this i'm going to you know close this this is height it doesn't close or close it i'm going to refresh and open up chat window uh let me try just closing it and trying again although i may need to just end the conversation here you'll notice like the conversations are leaking leaking over between service portal and play center we're going to change that obviously but we're not there yet and right now it's going to tell me no agents are available because i you know i'm not logged in as beth goodman or beth um anglin in my uh other tab there but that's how you can uh still uh you know launch virtual agent uh in here but live agent only in another portal okay now you'll notice uh for this if i were to do right click inspect you notice that the url if i were to switch go all the way here you go the url has a system within it so you'll notice that the system for the portal is or the portal branding is easy branding and live agent only is true ampersand says portal live agent application equals hr so you can actually use this to your advantage so if i were to let's say i'm inside a page let's say i'm inside like i don't know some other level of employee center service portal i can add a link in here like an an href link to open virtual agent uh the chat client excuse me i'll be in a different tab i can open it and control that experience so uh you know the url to open to go directly to a checkpoint is um you know whatever that link was you saw in the inspect uh i have it pasted here but you can see this for yourself but it's basically this right it's your instance slash smv a web client and then several assist prompts right so if i wanted to create a link that took users directly to a live agent i just create a link like this right so if i were to press enter here this would open a separate check client right and it goes take me straight to live agent so using this i could also within a page let's say i'm you know i'm in oh i don't know knowledge base and i want to add an a virtual age a chat link here that took me directly to a topic let's say you know i'm in a knowledge base about hiring and if someone at this point was trying to like okay i want to chat where i want to open virtualization i want to show a hiring topic or an email issues topic right how do i do that so we're going to use the same principle but instead of sysparm live agent only i'm going to use another system called quite simply topic right the topic equals the sys id of a topic so i can launch a topic directly just by doing this and the sys id i'm going to grab from the cis cs topic page so uh let's see i'll try to go here from here uh you know what i'll go for whoops i'll go from the beginning and i just go to cis oops here there it is finally loaded cs topic and these are all my topics obviously i want one that's uh who's active is true and i can basically point to any of these topics i'll point to uh email issues are our favorite right i'll grab the sys id by going into the record right click copy sys id right so this is very um you know manual and deterministic but once you've got it you paste it in here but this this is effectively your url that you again add to an href or you can you can uh if you're more advanced embed add as an embedded client to run if i press enter here this launches my chat client and launches me straight into the email issues topic right uh yes this is i'll try to end the conversation here yeah ended okay so sysparm uh very very powerful you know live agent only is one topic is one um with different um things you can you can input so then the next thing i'm going to pause for questions uh marcel did we have any questions or i see some chatter yeah we actually have a request victor if you can post in those url links that you're using to link to the direct topic and to link out to um the the chat page that would be great just to give folks an idea of what the url is because it could be yes let me paste that in chat right now and i'll post i'll try to paste it in the in the va academy like comment section uh there but that's the ending url right before that would be you know your instance.servicenow.com and then that's it that's the example of a live launching directory from live agent and then uh topic etc yeah and then we have a question from an audience member can you have the live chat open in the virtual agent directly instead of opening another window so um katie what i think i'm hearing you ask is if you have a link to something let's say in that example victor used of hiring can you have that open in the chat client and not launch out to the um the separate tab experience for chat yeah so that's basically um you know what i showed the first time around i might have glanced over it too quickly but basically if you were to uh edit your agent config and in here add you know live agent only true oops don't be sure to add a comma uh click save then next time i launch a service portal i'll close this i'll keep that up then it'll launch in that widget right it won't launch from say a separate window so that's how i do it by just doing it here okay so yeah so the last thing i want to show is skip load history true so you might have saw like some leakage between your service portal and your employee center and let's say you have multiple portals of available running with virtual agent and you want to keep them separate or not so much separate sessions i want to be clear but i want to clear my previous conversation i can do that with uh skip load history so um again the system here is skipper of history calling true and you'll see here um when i did because it's true you don't see all my past conversations so you don't see all the other times i tried to run a live agent you don't see all the other times i tried to go around the email issues topic etc it is brand brand new fresh and then if i were to also include this variable in the employee center which i think i did i'm going to double check here i'm going to go back to employ center view settings uh nope i didn't i could edit that don't forget the comma skip load history true and then let me go back to service portal and try to just run it i'll turn off uh live agent only equals true so that i can uh get back to um my my chat bot i can call this tab don't need that anymore okay so let me refresh uh let me run oops email issues and you know blah blah blah from the topic and then let me separately in another window go to employee center and because i've set and place enter also to skip load history is true let me just double check one more time yep there it is yeah i'm back to live agent only there's no um you know email topic or i'm not in the midst of one just note however this ends the conversation in service portal too so you can't have like two concurrent sessions um that's not what skip load history does it just basically ends your previous conversation so you can start fresh in another portal or another or in another context okay now um a slight variation of that is a new variable called load active only okay so let me see where i should put that i'll put that in the uh in the service portal one oh and we'll conclude with uh with that so this is new in san diego but what this one does is that this actually keeps it it it's kind of both the best of both worlds it'll keep your existing conversation but it'll still clear your history okay so rather than having a long running past conversation of the day or of the session uh right it'll just keep your current car it'll keep you within your current conversation but it'll clear your your past conversations so you don't have a long running list um you may even want to do that if let's say um you know uh in employee center um you want the person just to have your hr topics without uh seeing past i.t conversation or past hr conversations about who knows what so that is um live what live load active only does okay and that is all for uh that is all i have uh in terms of showing you so just to recap we talked about uh no show me everything greetings how to go directly to a topic how to go directly to a live agent and skip load history so i'll pause here with any questions um marcel yeah feel free to read them to me or however we want to take care of that okay great we had a question in the chat are all the parameters available in the documentation um and i posted yes there's documented variables but i encourage you to visit the community forum because again we have some pretty savvy developers on that forum that may have found creative ways to create certain types of experiences so i would definitely encourage you to visit there post there if you have something that you're trying to do and can't seem to perfect or you're just reaching out for guidance and then we have another question regarding a custom virtual agent portal widget so it's not the standard service portal chat client um are there any limitations if you have a custom widget with some of the parameters um we looked at today and then also with the greeting topic um no there's nothing bad about it it's definitely more high touch high code so uh you you probably don't have some of our out of box uh configuration that we give you so uh nothing wrong with that just um you know just be sure that it that it's what you want right it's acting as as desired and uh yeah i'd say again nothing wrong with that um um i'm just thinking like worst case scenario like maybe in the future we add some new feature in our default widget that you may have to manually uptake in your custom widget but that says you know that's as bad as it gets which really isn't bad at all so no no no problems with that um you know we we try to provide as much out of box um tools as possible to you but if you have your own set requirements requires a custom virtual agent widget then you know by all means uh you know you can you can have your own yep and just as victor said maybe a little bit of extra testing with each patch or release you uptake just to make sure that things maintain their intensity all right and then one last question um do we have any information on integrating virtual agent with google chat or will there be a spokes available soon like a microsoft teams yeah so unfortunately we don't have an out of box integration uh with google chat and i'll sep i'll differentiate out-of-box integration versus not out-of-box out-of-box integrations we have with like teams and slack uh and facebook messenger you might have heard of those uh if if we don't have an out-of-box integration available um it's still technically possible using something called the custom chat integration framework or csif so if you search for that in the docs you may see it and you know you can use that to integrate with other messaging clients just be aware that it is very custom and high code so not as perhaps not as guided as our virtual agent api and other out of box integrations great thanks victor and then a question regarding languages um so we have a question about just some difficulty routing um some of the cues to an agent depending on the language skill um so any guidance there when you're working with the live agent and multilingual routing yeah that's a good question a good use case i've seen a lot of i'm going to cop so eric i'm going to copy in your your chat and i will try to cover that in the future so that is basically live agent routing via cues you know long or you know very brief answer you do have to set your your cue conditions or your q skills one of those two things two length different languages to enable that experience but we're gonna we'll show that pretty soon you know um stay stay tuned yeah that's a great question and that may be a great future session as victor said something on really perfecting that multilingual experience from the virtual agent nlu side all the way through to the live agent experience yep so um yeah any other questions otherwise i think we're at time marcel we are fantastic thank you everyone um great questions great participation we love seeing you guys every other week yep thank you everyone have a good one i'll see you in two weeks bye