@Ibettsdev
"Small Talk" topics are what I call "out and back" topics. These are quick Q&A topics, as well as the conversational moments that a user might interject in a topic, that needs to be answered before completing a topic outcome. Conversationally, imagine this: a user wants to request a day off. As they are looking at a calendar, they realize they could get an extra day off if they knew the next corporate holiday. They find out the next holiday then return to complete their time off request. We're simulating that experience in the Virtual Agent.
Small talk topics can run independently - they're not like topic blocks where they are dependent on calling topics so I think of these small talk topics as "quick Q&A".
Whereas topic switching jumps from topic to topic, small talk allows the user to return to the calling topic if initiated from another a topic. The community post link that was shared is a bit outdated, the return to the calling topic is presumed, so that setting has been hidden (if not removed).
Here's where i've used small talk:
Greeting Small talk - When the conversation launches, I display a complete greeting with outages, tickets to update etc. The user might respond to all of that with "Hi Bot, how are you?" I created a quick small talk to respond to the greeting and quickly re-direct topic discovery.
Holiday Small talk - A list of corporate holidays (this is just a bot response with text) specifically to support "When is the next holiday?"
Check the weather - an API call to display the weather of a selected city. This can run on it's own but I also wanted a topic that could respond to a potential question that might surface during a user's travel request. In this example, my topic is "request approval to travel" and it's reasonable that anytime during that exchange, the user asks - "will it snow in Denver?" I call my weather small talk topic.
Hope that helps!
