Guidance on Controlling Topic Discovery in Virtual Agent for Messaging Applications

[Kohei Tominaga1]

Hi everyone,

I’m working on integrating Virtual Agent with a Messaging Application and have a few questions regarding the flow of conversations. Here’s the scenario:

• When a user sends a text input, a conversation is triggered in Virtual Agent. This is working
• Once the conversation starts, as the default behavior Topic Discovery is executed automatically. However, I need to ensure that the conversation always navigates to a specific topic.
• The default setup topics like Greeting or Fallback are currently being triggered, but they are not necessary for my use case.

I’m looking for guidance or ideas on how to bypass these default topics and ensure that the conversation directly starts with the specific topic I want. Any suggestions or implementation tips would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you in advance for your help!

[Lynda1]

Wouldn't changing the greeting setting to the topic you want started work? I have not tested this, would need to ensure that topic is as a setup topic so that you can add it to the configuration.

[Tricia Cornish]

@Kohei Tominaga1  - I have VA integrated for SMS conversations and I used context variables and topic conditions for applicability (devicetype and channels) to display or hide the topics based on the channel. You're still going to have setup topics, so you may want to configure a "Custom Greetings and Setup" for devicetype = SMS and create an abbreviated experience, for example the SMS Greeting topic (Hi {FirstName}) was what I did - very brief and I decided not to ask "Anything else"

Your topic discovery is going to surface topics that meet the channel and devicetype conditions so in each topic you'll want to set the conditions so that topics for SMS exchanges are true (and topics for all other devicetypes = false) 

Hope that helps!