Question: Custom Bots, Bot Interconnect, Virtual Agent, and AI Search connections.

[Drew Black]

Has anyone successfully setup Virtual Agent Bot Interconnect with custom bots? Looking to make topics and AI Search fallback available to bots created by other teams within the organization.

Documentation can be hazy or confusing in some areas. While there is a lot of it, documentation related to already established plugins such as the Teams or Google Dialogflow integrations are pretty straight forward.

The only way I can think the custom bot would be able to use Bot Interconnect would be the Virtual Agent API. Though I find the one return endpoint to be confusing. The documentation on the API has confusing payloads, mostly because you don't know the bare minimum you need to get a working response back and there are deprecated parameters you don't need.

When I initially started messing with the Virtual Agent API using a video I found, nothing would appear in the system log. Then after installing Bot Interconnect, it was like the system log came alive. I was even able to create a NodeJS app and change the return endpoint to point to my app so I could see the responses without the mess of the system log.

Any experience from others would be greatly appreciated.

[Drew Black]

Since posting I have found other pieces of the installed applications, but it's still not clear how all the parts go together. There are actions and subflows in Flow Designer related to facilitating Bot to Bot communication which obviously are meant to be called from topics. It would seem that a topic would have to be created for the Bot to Bot communication and the Virtual Agent API would need to be used to send the topic to start the conversation.

My other thought is the setup of a new channel, provider, scripted REST API, etc to facilitate the communication between virtual agent and an external bot. I have followed the steps in documentation, but am still trying to get the API to work. I am unsure if the provider configuration is correct and what is actually required and not required with the actions to have a minimal working setup. I am also not sure of the authentication at the moment and if a simple token would allow it to work similarly to when calling the virtual agent API. End result should probably use OAUTH.

It would be nice to simply see a working setup to understand how the application was meant to be used. Our use case at the moment is simply wanting external bots to be able to ask Virtual Agent to search AI Search and return those results back to the external bot. In another case we want to connect to an external bots APIs and return that output back to the Virtual Agent conversation, which can be done by calling those APIs within a topic.

[Drew Black]

@Victor Chen Would you be able to clarify any of this related to Virtual Agent Bot to Bot communication?

[Community Alums]

@Drew Black, did you manage to get this working using the 'Virtual Agent Bot Interconnect' app?

I am trying to do a similar thing but is around passing a chat to a 3rd party system. See my post: Virtual Agent Chat integration with 3rd party chat... - ServiceNow Community