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What's Conversation Assist?

Conversation Assist offers recommended bots and answers to your human agents inline in their conversations with consumers, and on-demand within a dedicated widget.

Animation showing inline recommendations being offered

When your agents take advantage of these just-in-time recommendations, they become more efficient and save time. What's more, their conversational outcomes are improved and more consistent. Conversation Assist can even help to reduce the time to onboard new agents.

You can set up bot and answer recommendations in just a few clicks.

On the Home page of Conversation Assist, you'll find a dashboard of rich analytics, which you can use to continuously monitor and tune recommendation performance. Use this valuable data to understanding the impact that your solution is having on your agent operations.

View of the top of the Conversation Assist dashboard

Just getting started? Complete the Using Conversation Assist tutorial.

Inline versus on-demand recommendations

Conversation Assist offers two types of recommendations:

  • Inline recommendations
  • On-demand recommendations

Inline recommendations

Inline recommendations are answers and bots offered in real time directly within the conversation with consumer. They're based on the intent that's detected in the consumer's message.

Animation showing the agent being offered an answer and a bot to respond to the consumer's query, where the agent selects the answer and sends it to the consumer

On-demand recommendations

Sometimes your agents need more flexibility within conversations. Sometimes, they need to be able to look up answers and bots on demand, regardless of what the consumer just said. The On-Demand Recommendations widget meets this need.

Animation showing the agent searching on-demand for a recommendation to a particularly consumer query, where the agent selects the answer and sends it to the consumer

Use either type or both types

You can choose to offer your agents inline recommendations, make available the On-Demand Recommendations widget, or do both.

When offered a recommended answer, the agent can send it to the consumer. The agent can optionally modify it before sending it.

When offered a recommended bot, the agent can delegate the conversation to the bot, so it takes over. The agent stays in the conversation, so they can monitor the bot’s progress and remove the bot if needed.

Rich or plain answer recommendations

Currently, rich answer recommendations are supported only on the Web and Mobile SDK channels.

When offering your agents answer recommendations, you want them to be relevant. But you also want them to be engaging, right? We agree.

So, when it comes to offering answer recommendations, you have options: You can offer plain text answers. Or, you can offer both rich and plain answers, and let your agents choose which type to send within the conversation. Here below, we’ve done the latter.

Rich answers being offered to the agent along with plain answers, inline in a conversation

Rich answers being offered to the agent along with plain answers, via the On-Demand Recommendations widget

Considering supporting rich answers. Their multimedia nature makes them much more engaging than plain answers, leading to a best-in-class experience for the consumer. Learn more.

Answer recommendations enriched via Generative AI

If you’re using Conversation Assist to offer answer recommendations to your agents, you can offer ones that are enriched by KnowledgeAI's LLM-powered answer enrichment service. The resulting answers, formulated via Generative AI, are accurate, contextually aware, and natural-sounding. Learn more.

More key concepts

Recommendations are intent-based

Conversation Assist offers recommendations based on the intent that’s detected. For an inline recommendation, this is the intent detected in the consumer’s message. For an on-demand recommendation, this is the intent detected in the agent's query.

View of the agent workspace with two recommendations being offered to the agent

Recommendations are skill-based

Recommendations aren’t just intent-based, they’re skill-based too.

When Conversation Assist offers a recommendation, it always does so based on not just the detected intent, but also the conversation’s assigned skill. This means you can "map" a slice of content to desired skills.

Multiple recommendations

You can specify the maximum number of recommendations offered by Conversation Assist at a given time. You can offer up to five.

Recommendation sources

Recommendation sources include knowledge bases and bots:

  • Using knowledge bases: During setup, you must assign one or more skills to the knowledge base whose articles can be recommended. In turn, during a messaging conversation, if the conversation’s skill matches the knowledge base’s, and if an article therein has a matched intent, Conversation Assist recommends the article as an answer.

  • Using bots: This works similarly. During setup, you must assign one or more skills to the bot that can be recommended. And during a messaging conversation, if the conversation’s skill matches the bot user’s, and if the bot supports the consumer's intent, Conversation Assist recommends the bot for use.

Access Conversation Assist

  1. Access the dashboard of Conversational AI applications.
  2. Click Conversation Assist.