The new Rome upgrade hit our PDIs last week, bringing with it a bunch of cool enhancements to everyone’s favorite chatbot platform, Virtual Agent.
The VA updates in Rome include everything from making initial setup and configuration easier through to improvements to the topic design and editing process, and even new analytics capabilities.
Hardit Singh has made a great 5-minute video on some of his favorite new features which you can watch either here on the community or directly on YouTube.
For a detailed rundown on everything that’s new, check out the Virtual Agent Rome release notes here.
In this post, I cover off five enhancements related to improving the user experience for VA end users:
1. Display video/rich content and link previews in conversations
There’s now a Video bot response control that allows you to include YouTube videos in conversations. In Hardit’s video he includes a demo of how to set this up. You can go directly to the demo using this link.
We also now have link unfurling which enable content-rich previews of selected URL links in web and mobile conversations. These previews can include text, images, and videos.
2. Upload images and include a header card with choice lists
Upload an image file in the Static Choice input control and the Image output and card bot response controls. The URLs for these images are generated dynamically based on the server in which the instance is running.
Header card in Reference and Static Choice lists: Enhance choice lists with rich header cards that contain an image or video card. When a choice list has a header, the search filter is suppressed and up to five items are displayed by default. If there are more than five items, the user can view the additional items.
3. Asynchronous chat
Available for Live Agent and Virtual Agent, asynchronous chat allows organizations to maintain constant engagement with end users whenever there is meaningful information to share. Users can respond and interact with agents at their convenience. With asynchronous chat, users can engage in long-running conversations with agents, as well as receive proactive messaging at any time. The two parties don't need to be simultaneously online.
Requesters automatically receive new message indicators for unread messages in messaging and chat channels.
4. Pause functionality
Inserts a pause in the conversation to control the conversation pace. To end users, this feedback is seamless and is displayed as a typing indicator. The Pause topic block appears on the Utilities palette for easy access.
It’s previous been possible to achieve this with a work-around but it’s great to now have it as an OOB feature.
Hardit has a demo which you can go to directly from here.
5. Geolocation retrieval
Retrieves the latitude and longitude coordinates of a user’s location. This block uses the geolocation custom control to retrieve the user's location coordinates. The geolocation custom control is also available for use in topics.
Again, Hardit has a demo of this which you can go to directly from here.
Head to Rome
So, if you’d like to start enhancing the Virtual Agent experience you deliver with these cool new UX improvements, why not upgrade your PDI to Rome today and start experimenting with them?
Pro tip: it may take around two hours for the upgrade to complete, so get the process underway and find something else to do while you’re waiting. You’ll receive an email when your instance is available for use again.
Related links
The full Virtual Agent product docs for the Rome release
The Rome update release notes for Virtual Agent
Platform topic blocks (including the new Geolocation and Pause topic blocks)
Lists of pre-built topics, topic blocks, and NLU models
With Rome, there are now more OOB topics and NLU models for the various business applications that support Virtual Agent: Customer Service Management, Field Service Management, HR Service Delivery, Instance Security Center, IT Service Management
