Reusing intents from prebuilt NLU models

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated August 1, 2024
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Reusing intents from prebuilt NLU models

    ServiceNow enables customers to save time building Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models by reusing intents from prebuilt Virtual Agent NLU models. These prebuilt models support chatbot conversation flows in IT Service Management (ITSM), Customer Service Management (CSM), and Human Resources (HR) topics. Each intent in these models corresponds to a specific Virtual Agent conversation topic, providing validated and context-aware language understanding. Although the prebuilt models are read-only, their intents can be imported into customer-created models to extend functionality efficiently.

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    Key Features

    • Prebuilt Virtual Agent Models: These models are tailored for ITSM, CSM, and HR business units, built from a large corpus to understand relevant language and vocabularies.
    • Intent Reuse: Customers can import intents from prebuilt models into their own NLU models, combining them with custom intents.
    • Read-only Prebuilt Models: While the original prebuilt models cannot be modified, their intents serve as a foundation or can be copied to create new models.
    • Plugin and Role Requirements: Accessing prebuilt models requires installing and activating specific Virtual Agent plugins (for CSM, HR, ITSM) with proper admin roles.
    • Application Scope Considerations: NLU models and their contents are tied to a specific application scope, which cannot be changed after creation, so selecting the correct scope upfront is critical.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    • Accelerate chatbot development by leveraging tested, validated intents aligned with common business scenarios.
    • Ensure consistency and accuracy in language understanding across ITSM, CSM, and HR chatbot implementations.
    • Maintain flexibility by combining prebuilt intents with custom intents to tailor chatbot responses to unique organizational needs.
    • Streamline setup by activating the necessary plugins and confirming application scope before building NLU models.

    Reuse Natural Language Understanding (NLU) intents by importing them from a prebuilt NLU model to other models. Reusing intents saves time when building your models.

    Prebuilt Virtual Agent NLU models provide language understanding needed for chatbot conversation flows in ITSM, CSM, and HR topics. Each NLU intent in these models maps to a single Virtual Agent conversation topic created in Virtual Agent Designer accordingly.

    The prebuilt models are read-only, but contain validated intents that you can reuse in your NLU models. For example, the prebuilt HR model for Virtual Agent contains several intents regarding HR requests. Adding the intents to one of your models makes that model ready to respond to user inputs regarding HR.

    Prebuilt Virtual Agent model content

    Each of the prebuilt Virtual Agent models uses language that's pertinent to their respective business unit (BU). The NLU that processes this language, built from a word corpus of 3 million words, is context-aware of general linguistic patterns and both ServiceNow and user-defined vocabularies.

    Examples of how Virtual Agent NLU is context-aware of general linguistic patterns and both ServiceNow and user-defined vocabularies.

    The prebuilt models map to common conversation topics used by Virtual Agent chatbots across each of the three BUs. Those topics correspond with intents that perform BU-specific actions.

    The prebuilt Virtual Agent NLU models map their intents to common conversation topics used by Virtual Agent chatbots across each of the three business units.
    For more NLU and Virtual Agent context, refer to the following product documentation:

    Virtual Agent and NLU plugins and roles

    To access the prebuilt Virtual Agent models in the NLU Workbench, you must install and activate these plugins using the admin role.

    Plugins Descriptions
    • CSM Virtual Agent conversations [com.sn_csm.virtualagent]
    • Human Resources Scoped App: Virtual Agent Conversations [com.sn_hr_virtual_agent]
    • ITSM Virtual Agent conversations [com.snc.itsm.virtualagent]

    Enables Pre-built Virtual Agent topics, topic blocks, and ServiceNow NLU models for the Customer Service Management, HR Service Delivery, and IT Service Management applications.

    • Requires the Glide Virtual Agent (com.glide.cs.chatbot) plugin to be activated.
    • Automatically activates the NLU Workbench (com.snc.nlu_studio) plugin.

    Creating NLU models that reuse predefined Virtual Agent intents

    The prebuilt Virtual Agent models are set to read-only and can't be edited. However, the intents in these models can be imported into your new model, alongside any new intents you've created in your model. You can also copy the prebuilt model and use the intents as a foundation for a new model.

    To reuse the intents from a prebuilt Virtual Agent model, choose the prebuilt model when importing intents. See Import an NLU intent.

    NLU models and their intents and entities are associated to an application scope. The scope can't be changed later, so verify your target application scope before you begin.