Switch topics in middle of a topic flow in virtual agent

[Harsha Pappala]

Hi Everyone, 

We have certain custom topics created, where we are asking the user with information on the incident to be filled. In middle of the topic flow, if the user says something like 'this is not my issue' or 'I dont want to this' or 'go back to original'. I want to fallback to my greeting topic that we have. 

How to achieve this ? should we create a NLU model with utterances and intent and create a topic for it. 

Please advise ?

[Amit Gujarathi]

Hi @Harsha Pappala ,
I trust you are doing great.

Here's how you can go about it:

1. First, create a new topic in ServiceNow's Virtual Agent platform for the fallback behavior that you want to achieve. You can call it something like "Greeting Fallback Topic".
2. Next, within the topic where you have the custom topics created, add a conditional branch node to check for the user's response. In your case, you can add a check for responses like "this is not my issue", "I don't want to do this", or "go back to original".
3. If the user's response matches any of the conditions you've set, you can direct the conversation flow to the "Greeting Fallback Topic" that you created earlier.

There's no need to create a NLU model with utterances and intent for this scenario. The conditional branching functionality in ServiceNow's Virtual Agent platform is sufficient to handle the situation.

[Harsha Pappala]

Hi Amit, 

Thanks for your great response, If i want to add this functionality in all my topics for helping with topic switching, wouldn't it be good have a NLU Model for this. 

[Harsha Pappala]

@Amit Gujarathi 

I wanted to give the user option to switch between topics, based on his inputs, so I enabled this topic switching involving NLU. 

Seems there is an out of the box 'End conversation' topic which can handle the utterances I gave. 

User can input any of "this is not my issue", "I don't want to do this", or "go back to original" and give an option to close the conversation and start the greeting topic. 

This opened a can of worms, in an create incident topic, if user gives "I have problems with create incident" as the description, it again predicts that he wants to create an incident and loops back to the topic. 😞

Please advise

[Yasser Al Kindi]

Sounds to me like you're issue is with NLU, below might help - using entities, vocabulory and synonyms to exlcude certain words or phrases.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/vancouver-intelligent-experiences/page/administer/natural-languag...