If you miss any content, please leave it as a comment and I will add it to this article.
| Table of Contents |
My library Knowledge Sources To Go is very popular, but it was intended mainly as a thematically grouped guide to standard sources and was provided by me as a PDF file. For certain topics, however, there is so much content that I can no longer include it in that document, as it cannot continue to grow forever.
For this reason, I have decided to handle such topics in individual community articles like this one instead.
What is the Virtual Agent?
Virtual Agent is a platform for providing user assistance through conversations within a messaging interface. Use Virtual Agent to design and build automated conversations that help your users quickly obtain information, make decisions, and perform common work tasks.
Entry point to the official product information pages
Entry point to the official product documentation
Summarized overview in one PDF file
Provides implementation steps to achieve a prescribed set of product outcomes
7 Habits for a highly effective chatbot
The white paper contains seven highly effective habits when building your chatbot, and how ServiceNow's Virtual Agent platform sharpens these habits. These habits will ensure that your Virtual Agent implementation achieves your desired business goals and garners high user adoption. These habits have been identified and tested through hundreds of ServiceNow Virtual Agent deployments globally.
Trainings & Courses
Attend Virtual Agent Fundamentals to learn about Virtual Agent's benefits, how you can leverage it in your ServiceNow environment, and its components.
This course teaches how to use Virtual Agent to design communications that help your users quickly obtain information, make decisions, and perform everyday work tasks like HR request, or customer service questions.
The Virtual Agent Simulator will assess the learner's ability to implement Virtual Agent and Natural Language Understanding (NLU). In order to take the simulator, you must complete the Virtual Agent Fundamentals, Virtual Agent Implementation, and Natural Language Understanding courses first.
Attend Virtual Agent Integrations to learn how to integrate Virtual Agent with other platform capabilities and applications, making the Virtual Agent experience extremely powerful.
Developing Virtual Agent Topics
In this module, you will activate Virtual Agent in an instance, learn how Virtual Agent works, and create Virtual Agent topics for the NeedIt application.
Get Started with Virtual Agent API
The Virtual Agent API is a REST API built on the conversational custom chat integration framework provided with Virtual Agent. The API enables ServiceNow developers, advanced users, and admins to use Virtual Agent with an enterprise or any other third-party chat interface that supports conversational interfaces or as a secondary bot in an environment with multiple, specialized bots managed by a primary bot.
Articles & Blog Posts
2021-09-01 by david_vanheusde
Virtual Agent and NLU Quick Start Guide
If you are brand new to Virtual Agent (VA) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU), then this is the place for you! This guide will help you to get up to speed on activating and building your Virtual Agent, and is a great place to come back to as our products evolve over time!
2021-04-12 by community.moderator
ITSM Pro Virtual Agent Get Started
Very detailed and in-depth series of articles on this subject.
2021-08-31 by Victor Chen
Migrating Virtual Agent with update sets
The primary guidance for migrating VA topics between instances is to create a scoped app and to build your custom Virtual Agent topics in that scoped app. You can then publish the scoped app as an update set (xml format) and upload it in another instance. Below is another way to migrate several Virtual Agent topics without using a scoped app,
2021-09-01 by Lener Pacania
Need to improve Virtual Agent Adoption? Activate Conversational Analytics!
In this article I’ll focus on how a developer can leverage Conversational Analytics to drive better Virtual Agent adoption.
2021-09-15 by rohan ra
Enable live agent transfer from virtual agent
Recently, I was trying to enable the live agent to connect through Virtual agent. I followed the exact Agent workspace guided setup including the Advanced work assignment, but the connection was not working. I took the help of community articles and SN docs to troubleshoot the issue and have documented the exact flow I used to get the results. Hope it helps!
2022-04-08 by Chris Steinke
One simple change to improve the Virtual Agent experience
I think we’ve all run into it – you are using a chatbot, you type in something you think it should be able to handle and in response you get “Sorry. I don’t understand.” Where to go from there? Maybe you type in your request slightly differently, or you just get frustrated and give up. Personally, the most frustrating thing for me is ending up in a loop where over and over I try to get what I need only to have the bot tell me it doesn’t understand. If you are using ServiceNow’s Virtual Agent and haven’t been keeping up with advancements over the years, this might just be the experience of your own customers.
2022-04-28 by SandilyaSridhar
How to Create multiple topic pickers in VA chat bot
This article talks about a workaround for creating multiple topic pickers that render a specific list of topics as required. This article also talks about removing/Hiding the topics from the main OOB topic picker so to avoid rendering duplicates in the custom topic pickers.
2022-05-01 by Victor Chen
How to use AI Search and other search tools in your Virtual Agent to quickly discover answers
Tired of getting the message, "I am sorry but I didn't understand your request"? Use ServiceNow's search tools to get better results and answers for your Virtual Agent users. You can use the Search Fallback topic, powered by Contextual Search, or if enabled you can use AI Search.
2022-05-31 by Mark Roethof
Virtual Agent client branding guide
Working on branding the UI color scheme for your Virtual Agent client? Which labels go where, and what effect do these have? It can be a puzzle. Although with the San Diego release a new page for Conversation Interfaces has been introduced, with amongst others an improved branding overview which amongst others instantly reflects changes to the colors for 10 out of 22 labels, still some help is needed.
2024-09-16 by Mark Roethof
Uncovering hidden Virtual Agent client branding options
Let's have a closer look at hidden and undocumented configurable Virtual Agent client branding options.
2025-05-15 by @Victor Chen
Enhanced chat experiences for Virtual Agent available
enhanced chat is the new conversational experience that includes a dynamic, movable, and resizable chat window, allowing users to choose their own mode of engaging with Virtual Agent on their ServiceNow portals from a variety of entry points with multiple active conversations. For example, you can seamlessly flow from a search bar to a conversational experience:
Videos & Podcasts
2020-06-05 by ServiceNow Support
Adding a chatbot conversation with Virtual Agent Designer
Demonstrates how to use Virtual Agent Designer to create topics that define chatbot conversations between a virtual agent and user.
2021-09-22 by ServiceNow Community
How to get started with ServiceNow Virtual Agent | Rome Release
Virtual Agent makes it easy for employees and customers to resolve issues fast and get what they need, when they need it, with an AI-powered conversational chatbot.
2022-03-21 by ServiceNow Community
What's New in Conversational Platform for San Diego
Learn all about what's new in the San Diego release for Virtual Agent, NLU, Agent Chat, and AWA.
2022-03-21 by chad corriveau
Virtual Agent | ITSM ServiceNow
Demonstrating the Guided Setup of Virtual Agent.
2022-04-13 by ServiceNow Community
How to quickly pilot ServiceNow Virtual Agent
Access the insights you need to successfully pilot ServiceNow Virtual Agent. Join us for prescriptive guidance on:
- Enabling natural language understanding (NLU) in Virtual Agent
- Selecting your pilot conversations
- Piloting Virtual Agent with collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams
- Creating a great first impression with greetings and conversational design
2022-08-22 by ServiceNow Support
Conversational Interfaces | Getting started
Explains how to get started with Conversational Interfaces console.
2022-08-30 by ServiceNow Community
Virtual Agent: Staying out of the box
Activated Virtual Agent and looking for pro tips on how to ensure a seamless deployment? Attend this live webinar to learn about the out of the box conversations Virtual Agent has to offer and how you can tailor them to your organizational needs.
2022-09-08 by ServiceNow Community
What's New for ServiceNow Conversational Interfaces in Tokyo
Learn about the latest features for Conversational Interfaces in the ServiceNow Tokyo release. We cover Virtual Agent, Agent Chat, and Advanced Work Assignment. We also show off demos for new features like Sidebar, a new collaborative chat tool, and Interactive Voice Response (IVR).
2022-10-23 by ServiceNow Community
Get started with Virtual Agent in the Tokyo release
In this Academy, Victor will walk you through how to setup Virtual Agent in the Tokyo release, including plugin activation, using the Conversational Interfaces Home Page, Virtual Agent Designer, and more.
2023-03-24 by ServiceNow Community
What's New in the Utah release for Conversational Interfaces
Join Victor Chen, Samyuktha Reddy, and Eliza Orchard as we explore the new Utah release for Conversational Interfaces. See demos of features for Virtual Agent, Agent Chat, Sidebar, and more.
2023-09-12 by ServiceNow Community
What's new in Virtual Agent in Vancouver
Virtual Agent and all its updates for the ServiceNow Platform Vancouver Release! Join your Senior Developer Advocates, Earl Duque and Lauren McManamon, and special guest Principal Outbound Product Manager, Victor Chen, as they demo these new features.
Troubleshooting
Known Error Portal
Pre-configured filter for the respective topic. Remove the query string or modify the filters on the left side if you want to narrow down the search results in a different way.
Selected Articles
Non English Users are not able to see any results for any utterance while using VA after upgrading ... (KB0962131 🔒)
Quick troubleshooting questions for Virtual Agent NLU discovery (KB0963189)
Troubleshooting: Virtual Agent + NLU (KB0964432 🔒)
Virtual Agent - How to hide the "Live Agent Support" topic (KB1113653)
User not getting connected to Live agent using Virtual agent though agent available in a queue, No w... (KB1115687 🔒)
Virtual Agent is not executing a fallback topic and prevents any further interaction when answering ... (KB1115698 🔒)
Incidents resolved by "Virtual Agent "user, when moved from Resolved to Work In Progress state remai... (KB1117322 🔒)
'Virtual Agent' user assignment by IAR results in reassignment_count value getting incorrectly incre... (KB1117324 🔒)
Virtual Agent Supported Channels not available to select (KB1117147)
How to remove the Greeting messages and route to the live agent after the san diego upgrade (KB1117336)
MS Teams Integration
When clicking on links/buttons provided in MS Teams integration with ServiceNow only a small blank w... (KB1116030)
How to clean-up Microsoft Teams integration from your ServiceNow instance (KB1116195)
Virtual Agent Supported Channels not available to select (KB1117147)
Now Assist for Virtual Agent
Now Assist for Virtual Agent is ServiceNow's latest generative AI solution designed to enhance self-service experiences and improve digital workflows. Introduced in June 2023, this tool leverages large language models to provide direct, relevant, and conversational responses to user inquiries within the Virtual Agent interface. It can deliver immediate information such as code snippets, product images, document links, and knowledge base summaries, facilitating cross-departmental communication and increasing productivity. Now Assist for Virtual Agent integrates with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service LLM or OpenAI API, ensuring accurate and contextual responses while minimizing errors by pulling information from the customer's environment. The solution also supports features like multi-turn catalog ordering, promoted topics, and the ability to create different assistants with unique chat experiences.
Entry point to the official product documentation
Trainings & Courses
Now Assist in Virtual Agent Implementation
Use generative AI skills in your conversational experiences. Discover the overall architecture of Now Assist for Virtual Agent, required plug-ins, how to configure experiences, and use the capabilities.
Articles
2023-11-30 by @Victor Chen
How to request catalog items in Now Assist in Virtual Agent
With the Virtual Agent, users can order catalog items within a conversation without opening a separate catalog window. This enables users to get the items they need faster whether they're on Portal or an integrated messaging app like Microsoft Teams. With Now Assist in Virtual Agent, the ordering process is enhanced so that users can mention their answers and choices in their initial query and have the ability to change answers on the fly!
2024-01-03 by @Victor Chen
When to consider using Now Assist in Virtual Agent
As you evaluate using the new Now Assist in Virtual Agent, consider the following ...
2024-01-03 by @Victor Chen
Now Assist in Virtual Agent - What's New, what's different, and what's coming!
Now Assist in Virtual Agent provides a new low-code setup page that guides you through creating an LLM-powered Virtual Agent.
2024-07-04 by @Victor Chen
Now Assist in Virtual Agent: Migrating NLU topics to LLM
Do you have a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) powered Virtual Agent (VA) and a desire or means to enter the Now Assist universe? As of Washington Patch 3, you can migrate your NLU- or keyword-based topics to a Large Language Model (LLM) assistant in a low-touch manner.
Videos
2024-05-29 by ServiceNow Community
What's new in Now Assist in Virtual Agent for the Washington DC release
In this academy we learn about new features for Now Assist in Virtual Agent in the Washington DC release! Learn how to configure assistants, promoted topics, and migrate NLU topics to LLM Virtual Agent.
2025-01-12 by ServiceNow Community
Now Assist in Virtual Agent Xanadu enhancements
ssThe November 2024 release of Now Assist in Virtual Agent brought many enhancements to the design and user experience. Join Victor Chen as he walks through the many improvements of the generative AI-powered Virtual Agent on the Now Platform.
2025-03-05 by @ChrisSteinke2
Don't Sleep on the Now Assist Powered Virtual Agent!
In this video, I’ll give you a brief but powerful demo of the latest innovations in ServiceNow’s Virtual Agent powered by Now Assist. If you haven’t checked out these upgrades yet - you’re seriously missing out!
