What's New for Virtual Agent and NLU in the Utah release

[Victor Chen]

In the Utah release, we’re introducing several innovations that we’re thrilled about. Here, we’ll share what’s coming for Virtual Agent and NLU. 

  

Virtual Agent   

It starts with making the Virtual Agent widget more visible and engaging to your users. You can now build a proactive pop-up message from the widget to display messages and to directly open topics. This helps to improve adoption and greater issue deflection. 

A long-time favorite customer request has arrived – Automated Testing Framework for Virtual Agent topics. Generate and manage test case(s) to ensure the quality of your chatbot and that changes you make do not affect your conversations.  

To better support Teams and Slack integrations, we shipped a new Messaging App Integrations page, found in the Conversational Interfaces Home page (under Settings > General). This allows you to effectively install and manage your enterprise and consumer integrations for the Virtual Agent. If you're using Microsoft Teams, you get an enhanced linking experience. Slack users can now access multiple ServiceNow instances for a single Slack workspace. 

NLU Updates 

In the Utah release, Expert Feedback Loop has been integrated data directly into your NLU model and test set. We’ve also added Dutch and Italian language support for entities. Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese are enhanced by adding system entities. 

See the complete patch notes for Virtual Agent: Link  

See the complete patch notes for NLU: Link

Start your upgrade process for the Utah release today! 
 

[Loic1]

Link to the NLU Release Notes

[Paul Curwen]

Where is the documentation for the proactive pop-up message functionality? I cannot see it anywhere.

[Simon Hendery]

Hi @Paul Curwen,

The feature is called Proactive Triggers and the documentation is here.

@Mark Roethof has written an excellent article about it, which is here.

I hope that helps.

[Paul Curwen]

Managed to work it out, hopefully this will help others who stumble upon this in the future.

The very important point (that I missed) is setting this System Priority to true:  

com.glide.cs.advanced-chat-popover

It is mentioned in the documentation, but easily missed (at least it was by me). Why this isn't set to true automatically when you turn on Proactive triggers in Conversational Interfaces - Settings is anyone's guess...

Also noticed the documentation appears to be wrong, on this page:

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/utah-servicenow-platform/page/administer/proactive-triggers/task/...

It says 'This feature is only available after you have installed and updated the Omni-Experience Standard Feature Set to the latest version through the ServiceNow Store.' It makes no mention of the essential install of the Proactive Triggers application  (plugin name: sn_pt) 😳

Once everything is in place it works a treat and is easy to configure:

If this helps please mark as Helpful/Correct

[Victor Chen]

@Paul Curwen - I'll submit an update for the docs. Thanks. 

[mpmacconnell]

I followed all the steps provided by Paul. This works fine in our Sandbox instance, but in all our other pre-prod instances it will not work. Wonder if anyone has run into that problem? I put in a HI Ticket on it and they have refered it to the Dev Team. But figured I would see if others have run into this problem and how you might have resolved it.