Dynamic Translation for Virtual Agent with Custom Greeting topic setup and Pre-Chat Survey

[faiqabatool]

Hi ServiceNow Community,

I’m working on enabling Dynamic Translation for Virtual Agent. Language Detection and Dynamic Language Translation are enabled for English, Polish, and Spanish under Conversational Interfaces > Settings > Virtual Agent > Multi-language Support.

Dynamic translation works correctly with the OOTB/default greeting, but not with our custom greeting setup.

Our flow is:

1. Pre-chat survey → user selects an option.
2. Custom greeting asks: “Please provide more details about your issue.”
3. User enters free-form text in any supported language.
4. We expect Virtual Agent to detect the language and dynamically translate it.

For example, the user's preferred language is English, but they enter their issue in Polish. The language is not detected/translated when using the custom greeting.

Questions:

• Is Dynamic Translation supported for free-form string inputs within a custom greeting setup?
• Is there any additional configuration required to enable language detection in this scenario?
• Is there an OOTB way for the user to view the original message from a Live Agent, similar to how the agent can click the globe icon to view the user's original message?

Any guidance or examples of the recommended configuration would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Faiqa Batool

[faiqabatool]

@glideFather 

@Ankur Bawiskar 

@Simon Hendery 

@Dan Bruhn 

@Pradeep Sharma 

@Ashley Snyder 

@Maria Gabriela 

@JaeggerLegane 

If anyone has any insights or experience with this, I would really appreciate your response. Thank you!

[Pickl]

It’s great that dynamic translation works with the default greeting, but it’s definitely worth understanding why the behavior changes when a custom greeting and free-form input are introduced. This kind of scenario is common in real-world Virtual Agent implementations, so hopefully someone with experience in multi-language configurations can share a solution or workaround. I’d also be interested to know whether this is a product limitation or something that requires additional configuration.

[SohamTipnis]

Hi @faiqabatool,

You can install Internationalization plugin , this will help you to translate for virtual agent as well as different works in different world wide languages.

Let me know if this helps!!

If you find my answer useful, please mark it as helpful and correct. ‌‌😊

Regards,
Soham Tipnis
ServiceNow Developer || Technical Consultant
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sohamtipnis10

[faiqabatool]

Hi @Pickl and @SohamTipnis for your reply.

I have redesigned my chat flow so that it can work with dynamic translation. 

1. Pre-chat survey
2. Custom OOTB Greetings topic using vaSystem.sendTopicPickerControl(greetingMessage);. This shows a greeting message and all the available topics to the user.
3. User enters their issue/utterance.
4. Virtual Agent detects the language and asks the user to confirm the language switch.
5. If the user selects Yes, the chat reloads in the detected language, but it starts again from the Pre-chat Survey.
6. If the user selects No, virtual agents says something like "sorry I couldn't understand your issue pls tell me again".

Our required behaviour is:

Pre-chat Survey → Greetings → Language Detection → Yes/No → Custom Live Agent Topic

We do not want the language switch to restart the entire conversation or display the Pre-chat Survey again. If user selects No, We also want the conversation to proceed directly to our custom topic for connecting to a Live Agent.

I have tried using the "vaSystem.switchTopicByName(TopicName);" method but it did not work. If I add this method directly after the utterance function, it won't let the user type anything and directly starts the custom topic. So, the dynamic translation won't work in that scenario. I tried switching the topic in separate script action utility and it won't switch the topic until some topic is completed after the "vaSystem.sendTopicPickerControl(greetingMessage);" method, it keeps calling the OOTB methods like AI search to search the query of the user. But I don't want it to search.

Pls let me know if anyone has any idea, about the following:

How can I prevent the chat from re-loading after the language switch? and just switch to my custom topic?
How to switch topic when user selects "No" for language switch?

Regards,

Faiqa Batool