Some of you have requested examples of small talk topics for the Virtual Agent. That´s why I wanted to share some ideas about this concept.

What is small talk?

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.

Small talk topics run in NLU conversations that enable users to temporarily switch topics and return to the original conversation topic

This is one of the interesting capabilities of the small talk topics. With this you can switch to another topic to get extra information and get back to your previous conversation to complete your request.

Small talk example:

For example, you could be requesting PTO trough Virtual Agent and in the middle of the flow ask for today´s date:

One of the things we have to consider for the above example is to enable the VA to switch to other topics on the middle of the conversation. In this specific case, we will activate it on the Date Time user input block. For this, we have to switch on the "Enable NLU at input Node" on our user input block.

To configure the conversation to come back where you left it, you have to switch on the "Resume topic flow" in your small talk topic. In this case, get the date topic.

Finally, you will have to create an intent and train your NLU model to recognize when you want to switch to your "get date" small talk topic.

Small Talks Ideas:

Get the date: This is the script I used to return today´s date in a response:

(function execute() {

    var gdt = new GlideDateTime();

    return gdt;

})()

Tell me a joke: With the below script you can display random jokes to the end user. Just add the Jokes you want to display to your end users in the allJokes array.

(function execute() {
    var allJokes = [
          "Joke 1",
          "Joke 2",
          "Joke 3",
          "Joke 4",
          "Joke 5"
          ];
    var joke = allJokes[Math.floor(Math.random() * allJokes.length)];
    return joke;
})()

With the above approach you can randomly display answers for other small topic examples:

How are you?

Tell me a quote?

What do you like?

Could you recommend me a book?

For the above examples (and any other that implies random answers) you can use the same script we used for the jokes:

(function execute() {
    var allAnswers = [
          "Answer 1",
          "Answer 2",
          "Answer 3",
          "Answer 4",
          "Answer 5"
          ];
    var vaAnswer = allAnswers[Math.floor(Math.random() * allAnswers.length)];
    return vaAnswer;
})()

Small talk is a great way to give some personality to your Virtual Agent and get better user engagement. That´s why you could have responses for the following topics:

Tell me more about you?

Where were you born?

How old are you?

What is your name?

The examples we have covered were unidirectional, the VA answers but it does not ask about yourself. You could also build bidirectional conversations, as the below:

These were some of the small talk topics you can implement for your Virtual Agent to enhance the user experience. But now is your turn to get creative