fallback topic not triggering

[pavithra8]

Hi All,

We have set up our Virtual agent chatbot with custom topics in our San Diego instance. We have also created our custom fallback set-up topic. The same setup topic is also configured in the 'Conversation Interface > Settings > Virtual Agent > Custom Greetings and Setup > Default Chat Experience > Setup Topics > Fallback' setup topic type.

We want that if the users enters something completely gibberish as an utterance (such as 'sdjkfkhs fsdkhfsjkdfh ksjdfhiosuf isueioursoi fcu439934r') that the VA is not able to predict any intent/topic for, the fallback topic response should get triggered.
However, currently when user enter any gibberish text, the response is the value configured in the system property: 'com.glide.cs.general.retry_question_message'

As we notice from the 'open_nlu_predict_intent_feedback.list' table, the NLU is not predicting any intent or model for the  gibberish utterance.

How can we make the bot respond with the custom fallback response when the user enters a gibberish utterance and no intent/topic is predicted? Any help on this will be very appreciated.

[Tricia Cornish]

It may be calling a search first before initiating fallback. The two things I would look for is this: 

1) In your custom greetings and setup, is there any value in your AI Search Fallback above your Fallback topic?  If so, you may want to remove it for testing.

The default topic (AI Search-Fallback) executes a search, then if not helpful, calls the value in fallback setup topic. 

2) In your custom fallback topic, do you execute a search first? I believe the Search Fallback uses a topic block for search (contextual or AI - and they are different subprocesses)- it might be going through the search routine first. 

Seems counter-intuitive (and I'm not quite sure why), but I've switched from testing gibberish to testing utterances that are absolutely not in the instance ("what's for dinner"). Your gibberish contains numbers (by accident) but that could impact your searching. 

Hope that helps - 

[pavithra8]

Hi Tricia Cornish,

Thank you for your response.

I checked and confirm that :

1) In custom greeting and setup - we do not have any value for AI Search  Fallback. It is empty

2) In our custom fallback topic- we have not added any search. It is a simple bot responses.

Also, be it gibberish or some random utterance like 'what's for dinner' that doesnt exist, in either scenrio we didnt see the custom fallback response  getting triggered. We are still getting the response i mentioned about in the system proeprty in my initial question.

[Tricia Cornish]

Pavithra - Did you customize your greeting or which greeting are you using in your chat experience? (Dynamic Greeting or the Greeting)? How are you calling topic discovery? 

Are you using NLU or just keyword search? 

Unfortunately, I'm not able to get the sys_property message to display so if you could provide a few more details about the other custom set up topics, that might help. 

[pavithrajrs]

Dynamic Greeting and using NLU. Disabled AI search fallback still our default customized fallback is not triggering in case of topic not match scenario.