Standard chat
Summarize
Summary of Standard chat
Now Assist in Virtual Agent standard chat offers a conversational support experience within a static chat window, combining AI Search with generative AI chat capabilities. It enhances user interactions by providing natural language conversations that help speed up issue resolution and reduce the need for live agent intervention. This chat experience supports various content sources, including Knowledge Base articles, catalog items, Virtual Agent topics, external content, and people information.
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Chat Interaction Features
- Starting Conversations: The Virtual Agent greets users with an AI-generated message explaining its capabilities and limitations, encouraging users to verify answers for accuracy.
- Response Handling: Users receive synthesized responses summarizing relevant information with inline citations linking to sources such as articles, catalog items, or people profiles. Users can follow up with context-aware questions that build on prior conversation topics.
- Feedback Mechanism: Each response includes feedback icons allowing users to indicate helpfulness, which helps improve the AI model over time.
- Profanity and Clarification: Requests containing profane content prompt re-entry without offensive language, and ambiguous queries trigger clarifying questions with citations to guide users.
- Multi-Request Handling: When multiple questions are submitted at once, the Virtual Agent addresses them consecutively, with an option to continue to the next task.
Agentic Conversations
When AI agents are enabled, the Virtual Agent can reason, plan, and execute complex tasks across multiple sources and conversational flows. Users receive real-time progress updates and can view detailed AI processing steps. The agentic flow can be stopped at any time before an action starts.
Catalog and Content Citations
- Catalog Items: Conversational catalogs support starting requests directly in the chat, while non-conversational catalogs redirect users externally. Completed orders are summarized within the chat.
- Knowledge Base and Q&A: Responses include inline citations to knowledge articles, enhanced by Knowledge Graph for personalized answers.
- External Content: Integration with external systems like SharePoint, Jira, Google Drive, and others enables broader search results within chat responses.
- People Information: Enabled via Knowledge Graph, people citations provide detailed profiles and shared Microsoft SharePoint files (post-login), with clarifying questions to refine search results.
- Extended Entities: Custom tables linked to the Knowledge Graph schema allow viewing records such as assets, incidents, requests, and tasks directly from chat citations.
Fallback Options
When the Virtual Agent cannot find relevant results or understand a query, fallback options guide users to:
- Request live agent support
- Search the web (uses only the last query)
- Create a generic ticket
- End the chat session (for standard chat only)
- Trigger a custom fallback Virtual Agent topic
These fallback choices ensure users receive appropriate assistance even when automated responses are insufficient.
Now Assist in Virtual Agent standard chat is a conversational support experience within a static chat window.
Starting the conversation
The following figure shows an example of the beginning of a new conversation.
| Element | Description |
|---|---|
| 1: Bot greeting |
Note:
The Answers generated by AI. Review for accuracy. message prior to the greeting can't be edited or turned off. After greeting the user, the bot provides an explanation of what the user can expect. Because the large language model (LLM) is still learning, the bot indicates that it may make mistakes, and that the user should check answers for accuracy. |
| 2: User request | The user can enter any utterance. |
| 3: Response indicator | While the LLM processes the utterance, an animated avatar appears alongside latency feedback messages in the chat window to let the user know that the bot is working. |
Chatting with the Virtual Agent
After the user enters an utterance and a search result is found, a synthesized response may appear. A synthesized response includes a brief summary of the requested information and search results along with Genius Results. For more information on how these search results are found, see Now Assist Actions Genius Results and Now Assist Q&A Genius Results.
If multiple results are found, they are presented to users, and users can view inline citations and/or the Sources section at the bottom of the synthesized response. Users can view Knowledge Base articles, Virtual Agent topics, subflows or actions, external content, people citations, and complete catalog request items. Virtual Agent can only return available catalog items that match a user's request when the Now Assist Multi-Turn Catalog Ordering skill is enabled. Users can follow up on a synthesized response and receive an answer that considers the previous context. For example, if you previously were chatting about the company's travel policy and then enter International, the system recognizes that you’re wanting additional information on the company's international travel policy.
Whenever a single Virtual Agent topic is found within a synthesized response, users are brought directly into that action's flow. You may consider bypassing the synthesized response and options by automatically launching catalog items, too. For more information on automatically launching single search result actions, search for the sn_nowassist_va.synthesized_autostart_items system property in Available system properties.
Responses generated in Now Assist in Virtual Agent can come from a combination of catalog items, Virtual Agent topics, subflows and actions, Knowledge Base articles, attachments, external content, and people sources. The following citations may appear inline and/or within the expandable Sources section depending on what search results are returned:
If you select an inline citation, a popover appears containing either additional information or an action to start a request.
Responses can also be generated based on content from the catalog item description and the Virtual Agent topic description. When this occurs, citations lead the user to one of the items in the Here's what you can do next section of the response.
Each Virtual Agent response includes a feedback icons panel. The user can indicate if the response was helpful by selecting the like thumbs up icon (
). If the response wasn't helpful, the user can select the dislike thumbs down icon (
). This feedback is used to train the LLM model and improve responses over time.
If Now Assist Guardian is enabled and your request contains profane content, the Virtual Agent responds with a message prompting you to re-enter an appropriate request without profanity or offensive content. If your request is too ambiguous in a Virtual Agent chat, Virtual Agent asks a clarifying question and displays a citation with an action. Citations are presented starting from the second clarifying question. Select a citation to start the request. If there are no actions relative to the request, citations aren’t shown.
If you need more help, Now Assist in Virtual Agent directs you to either a live agent, resets the conversation, or creates an incident. The option is determined by the admin in the Now Assist in Virtual Agent guided setup. For more information, see Configuring assistants overview.
If you entered a single message with multiple questions or requests, a Ready to move on to your next task? card appears. For example, a response like Order a loaner laptop and also what is spam? When you select the Continue to next task button on the Ready to move on to your next task? card, Virtual Agent searches for a response to your second question or request. In this example, Virtual Agent would search for an answer to your what is spam? question.
For information about configuring a Now Assist skill, see Activate a Now Assist skill.
Agentic conversations
When you submit a single question to the Virtual Agent, the agent understands the query and begins a flow. When you submit a message with multiple questions or requests, Virtual Agent answers the multiple questions consecutively in a response. It can reason, plan, and execute across AI agents, Virtual Agent topics, conversational actions and subflows, catalogs, Knowledge Base articles, custom skills, and any Now Assist in Virtual Agent supported skills to help you. Before receiving a response, you receive acknowledgment messages from the Virtual Agent and on-screen messages to let you know where the agent is at in the agentic processing flow. After the processing has completed its flow, a View AI Steps section header appears, where the processing
flow steps can be expanded and viewed. You can stop the agentic processing flow at anytime by selecting the End flow icon (
). After an action starts, it cannot be stopped. Selecting the End flow icon () only stops the proceeding processing steps.
Catalog citations
For conversational catalogs, the Start request option appears, and if selected, the catalog request flow launches within the Virtual Agent. For non-conversational catalogs, the Go to request option appears with an external link that if selected, either redirects you to a new browser or pop-up window to order the catalog item.
When the catalog order is complete, Virtual Agent displays a card for the order.
Q&A Knowledge Base citations
The answer is shown with the option to view your sources through the numbered inline citations icon (
). These Knowledge Base inline citations show which ServiceNow knowledge articles were used to generate the response.
External content connections citations
If external search sources are added to your information sources when Configuring assistants overview, you can search through external content connections. This can include information from attachments and knowledge blocks, or from the following list of content connection:For more information about external content connections, see External Content Connectors.
People citations
Information about people in your organization can be found if you have activated Knowledge Graph. Information about the person you're searching for appears in the synthesized response, along with an in-line numbered citation and people citation in the Sources section. If a direct match doesn't occur and multiple people are found, try providing more information to narrow down the people search results. Up to three people can appear in a synthesized response. You may be asked a clarifying question, such as Are you asking about [user_1], the programmer, or [user_2], the faculty member? to yield better results. Selecting the person's name in the Sources section redirects you to the portal's user profile landing page.
Selecting the person's inline numbered citation presents a popover. The information in the popover can include the following information:
Although rare, when you receive a synthesized response that includes a person, you may also receive other citations associated with that person. For example, a Knowledge Base article that was authored by the person you searched for may also appear.
Extended entities and view records
Extended entity information can be found if you have activated Knowledge Graph.
These extended entities that come from the additional custom tables associated with the Knowledge Graph natural language query (NLQ) schema can include:
Select an entity in-line citation to view that entity record in a popover, or select View records to view a list of additional entities. Selecting a link from the View records pop-up opens a new tab with that entity table's data.
The following example is of a conversation showing 3 out of 12 requests and the option to view records and sources.
Fallback options
Select a fallback option to launch that mode or action.