all right folks let's go ahead and get started while we wait for some folks to join we'll do some announcements as always uh please visit our community forum for the latest and greatest information about virtual agent and conversational interfaces feel free to start discussions there ask questions give answers all of you are experts in my eyes and you know all of you are are great resources for our broader service now Community we have information already out there for the Vancouver release so check that out if you're watching this on YouTube yes this will be recorded and if you're watching this on YouTube again go ahead and click that like And subscribe button that's way you're not that way you're notified every time we upload our videos we upload our videos every time uh at the end of the week uh usually so uh if you miss parts of this or if you want to re rewatch this again it will be there on YouTube's uh on on the our community YouTube channel so check that out all right so today our topic will be what's new in Vancouver for conversational interfaces now you may be asking what is conversational interfaces well that's virtual agent that's agent chat advanced work assignment and sidebar uh we also we're also going to talk a little bit about nlu which is uh of course you know drives a lot of the virtual agent so all of that we're going to cover as well as um um you know do a demo as well so that's there that's our agenda virtual agent nlu AWA sidebar demo and then we'll do Q&A at the end as well if you have questions you can also put it into the Q&A button on the zoom if you're are watching this live and we will uh answer them as we see them great so let's let's talk about what's new in the Vancouver release now I hope all of you have been able to uh you know have a a sub proud instance or a PDI instance um for you to uh test the Vancouver release in Virtual agent we have a lot of enhancements for you and I'm going to go over them um so the first one is we've enhanced the conversational interfaces homepage so it now follows the Polaris theme and what that essentially means is we now have it now follows themes that you have in service now including dark mode we also have new UI for the settings page so you'll see in the screenshot here uh it's it used to be like left right tiles now it's just uh you know longer rows all the way down you can also change the scope while and see it in the conversational interfaces homepage so uh for apps that require uh a scope change proactive triggers as one example you don't have to exit the CI homepage and change the scope you can do it directly in the CI homepage and then of course a bunch of new features that are that came out in Vancouver um we have configurations for them in the C homepage and we'll go over some of them in a bit uh when you start your Vancouver instance or upgrade to your Vancouver instance don't forget the Omni experience standard feature set plugin I know that's a mouthful uh but that plugin uh is automatically installed for Vancouver but you do want to update it that way you get all the latest uh UI improvements uh in the conversational interfaces homeage page including updates to sidebar Etc so don't forget to update that plugin for your Vancouver instance issue Auto resolution also received enhancements if you don't know what that is it's basically a proactive deflection tool of powered by the virtual agent so the tickets that get logged that virtual agent can address get automatically deflected or routed to the virtual agent we tap on the user shoulder saying hey I can help you and that just saves the agent a bunch of time automatically so check it out if you haven't already but for those who are using it we have a brand new and for those who have not used it or have used it we have a brand new admin console experience that combines the homepage configuration and simulation all inone easy to use interface we support additional languages Portuguese Dutch Italian and we improve the uh experience for um notifications sent via email or SMS and you can change the behavior of that notification depending on which channel you want to use and different you can have different uh for example different Outreach behaviors of for users so all you need to do I think you just type issue Auto resolution your Navigator you'll see uh the the admin console for that so definitely check that out and check out the feature overall dialogue acts so this is a new feature in Vancouver and basically enables a more conversational natural language interaction with a virtual agent so every time you have a bullying node right uh yes you can click yes or no but sometimes users just want to say you know yeah or yep or absolutely Etc uh so if you if for anything affirmative anything to uh you know negative like no or nope or nope you know I don't want something that's all captured via natural language and if you want to modify a previous choice you can actually say Hey you that question you answer asked me a couple you know moments ago I want to change my choice and I'll recognize that and it'll you know rerun that choice okay so in order to enable this feature you do you need nlu and it is currently English only so just keep that in mind but otherwise definitely a feature for to check out uh for your topics if you want more natural Lang natural sounding language conversations and I will demo that uh in a moment so don't worry about that I'll show you what that looks like uh we have more virtual agent designer enhancements so uh on the top of the virtual agent designer we have a link called explore additional topics and this lists all the itsm out ofox topics and I know there's like 60 to 70 of them so I know there's a lot but we list them all including those that have spoke or Plugin dependencies sometimes you you know after youall that store up you don't see every topic that we provide to you because you do need a dependency whether it's a spoke or whether it's another plugin Etc well we tell you that and now so you know that's that's going to be beneficial and then we do have Dynamic topic blocks so we now you can now have one topic block that calls different topic blocks at runtime so you don't need uh you know three branches anymore for different topic blocks you can just have one topic block that routes to the other topic blocks so that's available in Vancouver uh Microsoft teams has a feature called message extension and we we actually use that so we actually provide AI search within a user's Chat bar now in teams so you can look up answers via AI search and share search results with others um in teams you can share knowledge based articles you can share catalog items people cards anything that you know AI search brings up you can share you can do that in the teams Channel or user to user user to user chat and then the other user once they get that search result they you know if they're a service now user they can click on it view the item in Portal you can also configure the search results uh on whether or not you want to show only guest access results so if you only want to show of you know publicly available results you can do that as well that's configurable I believe there's a assistant property there okay so that's a new feature we have for Microsoft teams users uh via the message extension framework that you know that the team's uh product provides more features multiple active conversations so you ever had that experience when you have uh two portals with two virtual agents but they're essentially mirrored because you know it's one chat bot right so your I conversation starts appearing in your other portal and vice versa and the only way you had to used to do this was to you know put in a skip load history or load active only or or something that to to clear the the the CH the chat every time you open it up in a new portal well you don't have to do that anymore you can now set chat uh client context that separates conversations between let's say an employee Center and service portal so you cannot have you know two different conversations two different portals and they wouldn't overlap with each other so you know if if a separation is a is a concern for you or if if you know chat security is a concern for you this is a great feature and it's it's all low code and I'll demo this uh in in a moment too time permitting so yeah great feature here conversational analytics dashboard we got some new enhancements we have the category selector in the topics page which is multi- Select so in the topics uh page for the dashboard if you want to analyze only your it categories topics or only your HR categories topics you can do that now okay so for those who want a more it versus HR filtering lens that's available and then uh good news user ID in the users page is now unhashed so can better identify which user is having issues or you just want to you know analyze uh what users what users are doing you actually know who the users are okay if we're unable to identify the user it'll still show up as Anonymous but otherwise user IDs are now unhashed last slide for virtual agent I know that was a lot of information but don't forget we also have now assist for virtual agents so uh now assist is our generative AI powered uh release that came out uh just last week and as a matter of effect and we basically generate answers from knowledge based articles uh and which show up in uh you know either service portal or employee Center but for this you know slide for this presentation it shows up in Virtual agent okay so it's a more natural language sounding answer uh that provides more contextual information powered by now assist uh in this case Azure open AI although that's subject to change and it's just a better experience than providing uh genius results or a list of links right uh just note that this is also uh currently English only all right so that's all for virtual agent I'll cover nlu now only a couple slides and then we'll turn it over to Sam Yuka for AWA and sidebar so for nlu uh we redesigned the workbench uh for better organization so you can see here now we actually organize nlu models by whether they're for a virtual agent I or AI search on the right hand side you see we provide more resources and guidance on noou models whether it's for new users or existing users for smoother onboarding right and you could uh you could tune uh you could have I nlu model tuning within this workbench as well don't forget uh don't forget you want to update the nlu advanced features plugin that gets you all the latest features uh you kind of see that in the bottom row whether it's model to uh expert feedback loop relevance toest which is new and and so forth so you may have that um strap installed if you do don't forget to update it irrelevance detection brand new tuning feature in Vancouver you can now Mark utterances as irrelevant to any model or IR relevant to a certain amount of model okay so that way if you if you have an utterance that you know the noou model is getting stuck on or it's a you know an innocent uh utterance that users constantly type that the nlu get stuck for some reason and you want them to just say hey ignore this essentially you can now add that in a repository so um you know whether you want to fix the utterance or or uh Market is relevant you can now do that great I'll now turn it over Sam Yuka to talk to us about what's new in AWA for awaa we introduced a skill level routing that is another level for finding the right agent with the right skills so what it means is we have added a new check box it's an evaluate skill level uh within the assignment rule so now if you see on the left side the top screen there is a new check box in the second row if your uh if the admin checks this box what this does is it will look all look up all the skills available for the agents and pick the relevant one before assigning the chat to that particular agent let's say if your agent is also uh checking the mandatory skills check box along with the evaluate skill level AWA looks at all the mandatory skills as the first step and then it will look for the uh evaluated skill levels who has the better skill score like on high or low based on that it will assign to the right uh agent with the sufficient skill level next slide let's look into what's new uh ins sidebar for Vancouver so now we are introducing multiple discussions on a record level for sidebar as you all might have been aware in the last two releases we have provided a single discussion per record now with Vancouver it's multiple discussions per record so what it means is let's say you have an agent and your leadership team team wants to know the updates of that particular incident so the agent can create a new discussion on that particular record and keep them posted with the updates like how that particular incident is getting resolved meanwhile the agent needs some help from other agents or subject matter experts they can open another discussion on the same record and have the discussion going on with them and let's say you have a dug team and the agent wants to check with the team like what's going on is there any prb or when the defect can be fixed so they can open another um discussion likewise they can have multiple discussions per record level all these records uh will be available under the new menu tab This Record if you look at uh look on the screenshot at the right side on the top is sidebar discussion menu the new record when when you click on that new the record it will show all the multiple discussions that's happening on that particular record and good news is for S customers who are looking for the sidebar with the multiple discussions we are also supporting for the S uh to add sidebar into it there are manual steps available for config configuring sidebar into s please do follow our product documentations for Vancouver to understand the configuration setup next slide we have done some integration of some enhancements uh for the sidebar teams Integrations so now you can send more than uh 4 MBA up to 1 GB file sharing between sidebar and uh teams now the sidebar agents can easily find the users by looking at the team's logo right next to the uh users name which can make them uh quickly understand where the user is coming from whether he's in the service now side or on the team side likewise the teams logo has been um available is also displayed for at mentions and notifications for the quick identification of the user type next slide we have made a change for managing teams groups or users permissions when you do the sidebar integration with Microsoft teams uh before talking about this slide I quickly uh wants to shout out for the customers who have sent this an idea to us and posted in our idea portal asking that in the previous uh two releases for the admin it is a additional step after setting up sidebar and integration with an Azure they have to go to the sidebar tables manually and pick all the users to one by one to add permissions it was like time taking and a manual step for the admins so we heard those ideas and we uh did consider to add this particular change for the for the Vancouver release so what this does is now your admin doesn't need to do a manual step they can directly go to the sidebar console as you see on the top screen for the Integrations level for the Microsoft teams when they click on manage it shows the third option as view permissions when they click on view permissions it will show all the Azure users with for the teams will be displayed in this manage permissions and they can search for a particular user they can do multi- select single select and add them uh for the sidebar providing the access not only for the group users if there are groups available within the teams the groups are also pulled into the service now and they can do the selection and add them easily this saves times to the admin and it's easy for them to make these changes whenever they want to reduce the access for the team's users next slide that's all from my side all right so let's do some demos let me just show you what I was referring to to by a first with some of the um virtual agent features and then time per meting we'll do Q&A I tried to do some uh during Sam's uh uh portion so let's get right to it so let me exit my slide and go to my Vancouver instance I'm going to start with the conversational interfaces homepage okay we'll get that to load so you notice there's some slight UI tweaks here for Vancouver but you'll notice that I can now change my scope here while I'm in this homepage and I have dark mode so I go to preferences go to theme go to dark you can now uh view this in dark mode it's the daytime for me so I'm going to change it back to light but an option for you now um the other thing I want to show is the improvements in the virtual agent designer so let me go to the V virtual agent designer here and you'll notice up top here we have explorational topics this was the page I link I was referring to that shows a list of itsm out of box topics and you you'll see some of these topics are don't have links yet because they have they have dependencies whether it's Microsoft after directory spoke or other plugins Etc and only after you install these plugins you'll get access to these topics um and then there's some other top you know a bunch of other topics that don't have any dependencies and that are available for you to use here so definitely a way to explore all the different out-of-box topics as well as their dependencies so let's let me show you dialogue Acts so I had created a topic here called email issues okay and the first thing to note if I go to properties this topic is nlu enabled it's got the model here got the the intent here and you also see we have a new configuration whether or not you want to enable dialog acts and whether you want to confirm modified values I'll show you that in a moment but basically you need these you need at least this this toggle on for dialogue X and I made a slight tweak to this topic so after I asked the user hey do you have authentication send receive slow issues we asked did the steps work that's my first bulling question and if it did I ask again do you have any more questions so that's two bulling questions in a row and of course if it says you know if I do have more questions it takes me all the way back to the Top If I don't it just sends me along my Merry way so let's see what this looks like I'm going to click test here and you'll see my first uh item I'll just say authentication issues and you'll notice here they they did this in Utah where they highlight the top the the nodes but now they keep the highlights so they actually can see it as a sort of a pathway here and for my first dialogue AXS um you know it says do these steps work for you yes or no I can just you know instead of clicking or typing yes exactly I could just say you know yeah it does and notice their dialog a runs on an nlu model that says oh yeah I meant yes which I did right and did I have any other questions um I do but then I can say hey you know what instead of a authentication email you know I say actually I can't send email and you'll notice it picked up on modify user issu this is the confirm modification toggle that I showed you in properties uh of course the variable I should probably change to make it a little user friendly but basically says you can't seem you like to change user issue to can't send email correct yes and now it takes me through can send email and then these do these steps work for you yep wh did I must have uh accidentally clicked or typed something do you have any other questions nope I don't and all done so that's dialogue act so if you again have a topic that with a couple of yes or no questions or uh with a bunch of steps uh or Choice nodes this will be very helpful for some of your customers okay so that's dialogue x uh the next thing I'll show you is multiple conver active conversations so I'm going to go back to I wonder if I have my homepage up I still have it and I'll get ready here by going to service portal so service portal loads I'll just show you the um configuration here from multiple active conversations this let's this lets me have a conversation in one portal a conversation in another portal without them without the same conversation happening at the same time in both portals so we have a new configuration here in settings virtual agent multiple active conversations and you notice it's turned on which is good so if you click on manage settings you know so I have two contexts here I have service portal this is default and it's default to true or that this is this is true as a default consumer contact I recommend you know we keep this as true and then I had created my own called ESC I just clicked you know I click new I you know created the record click submit and I have this context so how do I know that SP goes to service portal and ESC goes to employee Center uh I'll go back to the home screen and you you put in this context key in the agent chat configuration uh block and I'll show you what that means you all have seen this before when I uh go here at the portal I can click on this drop down these are the the the portals available to me I'll go to EC Polaris which is the employee Center and you know this used to be the place when it when it loads yeah this used to be the place where you put in like The Branding key and live as only or um skip load history well now I put in this consumer _ accountor context colon ESC and that's it okay and if I were to show you service portal uh it would also have uh this colon SP but this is for employee Center so now let me go to the service portal here I'll start a new conversation I'm going to duplicate this tab and I'm going to split it out so you kind of see it uh split screen I'll load ESC here which is employee Center and you'll see that I could actually run a topic here my email is just topic and HR is doesn't do anything it doesn't it doesn't mirror this I can continue this I could even in the HR or in employee Center do a run an HR topic and again no overlap no mirroring all separate conversations all right so I'll end this conversation here close this window again if you have any questions feel free to type it in the Q&A Channel or in the Q&A chat window and then the last thing I'll show you guys is the analytics dashboard enhancements so I'll go to to up to the top of the homepage click on to VA analytics which is this link right here uh almost almost done here and well I'll stay a little long for Q&A don't worry about uh time if if you guys have time so I go to the topics page here on the left you now have this categories uh bar so you notice I have an HR topic and an email issues topic uh so if I were to just say hey I only care about the it topics like email I can filter it and now all I get are the are the it topics or let's say I want only the HR topics same thing okay and then finally in the users page I'll show you the unhashed user IDs if it shows up for me while that loads I'll try to address some questions here um looks like my instance is just kind of Frozen well let's see I'll go to questions now oh there it is yeah um there's admin and then this is anonymous because I had I had uh High hopped into the instance as maint user so that's probably why it's Anonymous but you know you see admin there which is basically the only user ID I've been using so uh yeah that is the analytics dashboard enhancements so with that I know we're at time but I'm going to try to uh spend a little extra time to address questions may have so feel free to put them in the Q&A window and I'll go through them one by one here first question can VA be enabled on workspace as well um unfortunately it cannot at least not to my knowledge uh I believe some youth is addressing the ADBA questions I'll leave her to that um next question yeah I'll I'll talk about AWA question sure uh so for AWA if you want to assign all the chats without using AWA uh assignment ruled routing so that your agents can come online and pick whatever that's available in the cube usually it is not a recommended step but we are hearing this question mainly from who are migrating from connect support to agent shat expecting a same behavior that they have been seeing in Connect support which directly assigns to all agents whereas in agent chat the advanced work assignment definitely looks looks at the assignment rules and try to route to the right agents based on all those rules uh the one option for your agents to manually go ahead and assign to themselves is the capability called assign to me I have shared the documentation link and also the screenshot how the assigned to me button will pop up onto the top menu in the chat all right let's see let's keep going with questions here uh I know sujo was trying to up on our previous question we have one instance of service now virtual agent is enabled we have eight customers asking for integration with their own instance of teams okay Microsoft teams so the question is is this possible yes it is suio it is possible to have one instance uh connect to multiple tenants of Microsoft teams so if you look at the do if you view the documentation I believe there's a multi-tenant uh documentation out there but yes it is possible uh next question can you have separate chat box for different pages in the same portal like different topics in employee Center um different pages in the same portal I I don't believe you can but if you were to do it more manually if you were to build it more manually it might be I'm trying to think yeah I don't think it's that straightforward Louis so I wouldn't be able to recommend it basically it be it it would have it' probably be a lot of a decent amount of of manual configuration and scripting uh in the for the chat client in the portal I know these videos are uploaded to YouTube later is a PowerPoint deck available anywhere um we don't have a power we don't have the PowerPoint deck available however uh we do have an article in the community that goes over a lot of these features and of course as as you note it's um recorded so you can always view that later uh let's see here next question how to keep the HR chest distr from it to conversation take consideration also the interaction record created HR record should only be visible to HR R so that's a so yes that's true and that's actually controlled by um the uh the the reading uh sorry the the context variables that control uh which roles have access to that interaction record so I believe well I I don't believe I know I wrote an article about uh separating it TNR conversations uh in community so look out for been look out for that I think it's literally called you know how to separate it how to how to separate it versus HR conversations but yes um outof box HR conversations have the context variables that secure them uh in the interaction table and then of course you know this separation feature that I showed you uh is more to do with the the UI separation experience the experience separation you still need to just double check that your security is up to is up to is up to uh par there too um Meg asks you know you wish there's a way to organize SLS spit hrit topics I I agree with you entirely and the designer so uh you know I'm hoping too that we look at that but yeah that's something that we've been thinking about for a while is there any co-pilot plugin in the offer and I'm not sure what you mean by co-pilot plugin um we do have a now assist panel uh feature as part of now assist that's that might be what you're referring to so I would take a look at that it's called now assist panel uh so you can take a look at the documentation um yeah osne had a followup for Sam and then last question here uh at the portable virtual agent web client to a third party website custom URL must be an instance URL um to client to a third party website no or hold on the the custom URL doesn't need to be an instance URL right you know if I wanted to put virtual agent on you know yahoo.com right I could right the the client still has to connect to an instance in the back end that is true but the custom that you embed the client on which I think is what you're referring to uh that does not have to be a a service now instance or a custom URL a service now custom URL well tools like chat gbt be used in Virtual agent at some stage so that's what now assist is all about so if you check that out uh you can use the generative AI controller and embed that in um the virtual agent to provide a chat gbt like experience in the virtual agent and then on our road map we are providing more uh natural again natural language uh TurnKey question and answer uh based on knowledge base and uh and or service catalog so the the the short answer is yes um but you know we're not going to just plop Chad GPT into the virtual agent that's you know that's too simplistic in our view we're trying to provide you with a better experience so uh yes that is something like that is coming be on the lookout great now I think we've addressed all the questions yep all the chat looks good so again thank you all for joining us again the recording will be up uh you know later this week and definitely you know check out the Vancouver release go ahead and update that subpro instance update that PD instance and take a look at all the cool things that we have to they have to offer and don't forget now assist for gener uh for service now or generative VI Solution that's out there too so check it out