One of the biggest goals when implementing Virtual Agent is to give people the sense that they are in control of a conversation.

Now, obviously, we’re not going to be passing any Turing Tests in Virtual Agent and we can’t anticipate all the things that a person might want to chat about. We’re a long away from Bertram Gilfoyle’s Son of Anton.

But despite these limitations, one of the best things we can do when setting up Virtual Agent is to give people a sense that they are in control.

What’s Your State of Mind When Your Computer is Broken?

Ask any Help Desk Technician and they’ll tell you that people with broken computers come in one of around three types:

• The DIY Person — They’ve got a broken computer, but they’re reasonably sure they can fix it without too much assistance.
• The FIX-IT-RIGHT-NOW! Person — They are in distress and need answers Right. Now. Drop what you’re doing and HELP ME.
• The Chill Person — Yes, they have an issue, but they don’t have an inclination to fix it themselves and they don’t mind waiting in line for a technician later in the day or whenever.

(Personally, I am a type 2 for hardware issues and and type 1 for software issues.)

The truth is, that people change their state of mind based on the issue at hand and often based on their mood that day.

I often hear people suggest that chat bots should lead with articles from the Knowledge Base or push people to do something first before they get to talk to a real person. They’ve got to exhaust options before they get to create a ticket or talk to a real person.

But come on, do you want that sort of one-size-fits-all treatment when you’re the one with a broken machine? I mean, there’s a reason why Comcast gets such a bad rap about their customer service hotlines.

So, why not ask people what they’d prefer to do?

The DIY Person — Refer them to the Knowledge Base and maybe suggest some articles

The FIX-IT-RIGHT-NOW! Person — Connect them to a live agent! STAT!

The Chill Person — Gather more information, then create a ticket on their behalf and add it to the queue.

Let’s Build Some Choices!

Alright, don’t freak out, but here is the outline of what we’re going to do:

Notice how the Topic splits into three paths? The idea here is that we ask the person on the other end of the line how they want to proceed with this conversation:

The three paths I’ve got here roughly line up with our personas defined above. For this example, I didn’t build out the full KB search or figure out exactly how to transfer to a live agent (projects for another day!), but the incident path works very nicely.

I also really like the idea of looping and confirming that we’ve got everything right before proceeding. In a future post, I’m going to mess around with how to make that feedback loop more robust.

As always, here’s the update set if you want to play around with this example for yourself:

One of the things that I’m still trying to grasp about Virtual Agent is what variables are available in topics and how to interact with them. I’m also trying to figure out all the different types of topics and when to use them.

Fortunately, I was able to make some headway on both counts today and I’m happy to share with you what I learned!

The Goal

So, the point of this exercise is to allow a user to say “What day is it?” in the chat and have the bot respond with the date and time.

And possibly a picture of a kitten (for extra credit).

The Procedure

First off, let’s go create a new Topic in the Virtual Agent Designer (Application navigator > Collaboration > Virtual Agent > Designer).

Next, we need to enter in all the meta data about the new conversation and today I decided to do some research on what exactly is meant by “Small Talk.”

Well, it turns out that “Small Talk” is a type of conversation that is used as filler or something like that. The official word from the documentation is as follows:

“Build small talk topics that enable your virtual agent to engage in casual conversation with users. A small talk topic provides a response to a casual question that users might ask during a conversation, such as the time or date. A small talk topic can occur anytime within a conversation session and can be unrelated to the original conversation intent.”

From the Quebec Documentation

So, I sort of get that. Small Talk is just supposed to be smaller things that you can bring up at any time.

This begs all sorts of questions, though. Can you do a “Small Talk” in the middle of any conversation? If so, can the Small Talk access variables from the larger conversation?

Stuff to research another day.

For now, I’m just going to run with it.

Next, we get to building:

I’m going to drag out two blocks: A Script Action and a Card.

As you’ll see in a moment, I could have gotten away with just a Card, for this one, but I wanted to experiment with how variables work in Virtual Agent.

Script Action (vaVars FTW!)

Within the Script Action’s Action Expression (on the right of the screen when you click on the Script Action), I typed in the following code:

(function execute() {
    // 2021-04-21 JU
    // Store Date and time info

    vaVars.current_date_and_time = new GlideDateTime().getDisplayValue(); // Let's keep this simple for now
    vaVars.image_url = "https://placekitten.com/400/300"; // Maybe randomize this?
    vaVars.personal_greeting = "You have a great day " + vaInputs.user.first_name;
})()

The important thing here is the object vaVars.

HA! Check that out! It’s like a scratchpad!

We can both declare and read variables within that object from anywhere else in the Topic.

ALSO! Notice that there’s an object called vaInputs! That allows you to get access to any of the structured objects that are available in the topic! Even better!

I got a bit lazy and decided to just store the display value for the current date and time instead of capturing something like “Saturday, April 17th” or whatever.

I also added a “personalized” message and an image URL from placekitten (I love that site for mockups).

Card (Yay kittens!)

Now, all we have to do is display that information.

I decided to use a Card because it makes things super easy. (Eventually, I want to start playing around with Script Output, but not today.)

I made the card of type Large Image with Text.

From there, you just have to fill in what you want as the Title, Description and Image URL.

Conveniently enough, each of those options has a script option off to the right (the </> icon) where you can plug in script like this:

(function execute() {
    // 2021-04-17 JU
    // Show the date and time
    return vaVars.current_date_and_time;
})()

I originally wanted to get a lot more fancy, but I ran out of time today. But shoot, with a scratchpad and server-side code, you can do pretty much anything you want!

(Note: I could have indeed just returned the current date and time, personalized message, and image url right here in the code blocks for each section of the card. But I really like the idea of doing all the heavy lifting in a script action so you don’t have to go hunting around for where your code lives.)

The Finished Product

After doing all that, I’ve got to say, it looks really nice. Click the Test button and you’re presented with this lovely interaction:

Excellent.

Here’s the Update Set, if you want to play with it:

(Note, this update set is provided as is. There is no guarantee that it will work as intended in your environment. Please use your best judgement. And don’t just randomly install code you find on the internet if you don’t know how to fix things. Just, don’t do that, okay?)