Difference between the Search Fallback and AI Search Fallback

[jpeterson2]

Located in Custom Greetings and Setup -> Setup Topics I have both the Search Fallback Topic and AI Search Fallback configured. Can anyone explain the difference between these 2 and should I only have 1 of these configured or how do I control which one is being used...?

[Chris D]

How about that... I had no idea they added a non-AI Search Fallback in addition to AI Search Fallback. It's a  great addition.

Those two topics look pretty similar but the big difference is that one uses the AI Search Topic Block (and requires AI Search to be enabled/setup) while the other simply uses the Contextual Search Topic Block, which is the "old" search tool.

No idea what would happen if you tried, but you probably should not be using both of them at the same time. Keep in mind there is a separate "Fallback" Setup Topic too, different from - and predates - those other two.

At its end, the AI Search Fallback topic does (if no helpful results) switch topics to the regular Fallback topic to let the user search for a new topic, though the Search Fallback doesn't do that because that functionality and logic is already built-in.

So if you were using the AI Search Fallback and the Fallback Setup Topics, the Fallback Setup Topic I think ought to be the "Fallback Topic", not the "Search Fallback Topic". If you don't have AI Search setup, then you leave that one blank and you set the Fallback Setup Topic to "Search Fallback Topic" (or just the regular "Fallback Topic" if you don't like the search).

Note this lesson learned the hard way: if you don't have AI Search enabled but have it set the AI Search Fallback setup topic set (as it is ootb on upgrade), there will be no detriment to VA on the Portal - it'll basically just ignore AI Search and continue to use your designated Fallback Topic - but it may (for us, 100% did) cause freezing problems on Microsoft Teams (at least with Quebec).

[jpeterson2]

This is complicated lol - do you know how I can enable and setup the AI Search so that I'm properly using that? And if I understand correctly, if I setup AI you believe it will default to using AI and if no results return it will try the other generic fallback topic after it uses AI?

[Chris D · Accepted solution]

Yep - definitely a bit complicated. I hadn't fully setup AI Search yet - in fact I only got to do initial setup/testing on the Portal, not even VA (yet) - but I will say the basic ootb configuration (searching the Catalog and Knowledge) seems pretty solid, so the first step is to Request provisioning for AI Search (servicenow.com). From there with AI Search enabled, I think it should be about ready to go in VA (looks like the Search App auto-changed to AI Search here), but I haven't got up to there yet.

For the second question, yes, the ootb AI Search Fallback Topic will go to the regular Fallback Topic if there are no results or the results were unhelpful:

That "Fallback Topic" script is simply: vaSystem.switchTopic(vaVars._setup_fallback_topic);