Max number of Topics

[Lynda1]

I am curious if anyone has ever had an incredibly high number of Topics.

We currently have around 60 Topics and around 40 Intents (yes not all Topics have an intent by design).

I read a suggested max on Intents and have not found anything on suggested max of Topics.

This question is coming about because I have one area that wants to use the VA for Desk Level Procedures (DLPs). There are about 5,500 DLPs that equates to 5,500 Topics. 

These topics will not be discoverable and not have an Intent attached.

I wanted to get thoughts around this approach. That number of Topics frighten me!

[Chris D]

We have ~100 topics at the moment - I don't know of any technical limitations nor would I foresee any with having a lot of topics. I expect the largest "bottleneck" to be NLU in that the more intents you have, the more possibilities there could be - but as you pointed out, ServiceNow does have a hard limit on those, and even so, I'm sure the performance difference is generally negligible from normal expansion (say 10 to 20 to 100 to 150 intents). Irrelevant in your case either way.

But thank you for sharing your potential use case. That sounds like an utter nightmare to create (and maintain) thousands of topics no matter how simple they are.

Personally, I would simply not allow that and I strongly recommend you reconsider the design. I'm not sure what this "Desk Level Procedure" is, but I find it highly unlikely that there is not a better solution possible - I'm presuming there's some sort of standardization between these so the most likely best solution I'd propose is a single DLP topic that is "data-driven".

The simplest way you can do this is by defining the "data" in a knowledge article (even better, a custom knowledge template) and the coding the VA topic to display the content from the article (record) however best relevant.

You can get as simple or advanced as you'd like with your VA logic and even if you make it very advanced - such as parsing the HTML text from articles, such as to display step-by-step instructions from an <ol> in multiple VA outputs - I can all but assure you that it'll still be less effort than creating 5000 simple topics.

And if a knowledge article isn't the right fit, you could create a custom table/application and do roughly the same thing. And the benefit of it being data-driven is that you (VA admin) don't need to be responsible for the data (i.e. 5000 topics) - you just need to be responsible for one topic and have the respective data owners maintain their data via whatever process is best for them - a side benefit of knowledge articles being that you may already have a solid knowledge management process you can just have them use.

[Lynda1]

Each DLP is step by step instructions on one process. (We have a LOT of processes)

The team is looking for something that the processors can answer questions to guide them through the process, like a decision tree basically.

You confirmed my thoughts on using the Virtual Agent for this.  Going to see if I can find something else, they can use in ServiceNow.