Can the NLU be invoked manually

[jschaenzle]

Once the NLU is set up, can you invoke it manually without using the topic switching functionality? For example, say I want to collect a user's input then ask the NLU model which intent (if any) is matched, can I do that?

The use case would be, at a certain part in my conversation flow I want to extract some meaning out of a person's input but not necessarily navigate to a different topic. Or maybe I want to navigate to a topic but I want to restrict the navigation to only a subset of topics. 

Thanks in advance!

[Chris D]

Great question - not sure but I'm subscribing to this thread because now I'm curious 🙂

I would hope that NLU Workspace's "Test" functionality is provided via an API that we have access to, but if it is, I don't know about it...

[jschaenzle]

So Chris, as you understand it, is the Topic Discovery / Topic Picker functionality the only way to invoke the NLU?

[Chris D]

Yes, that's how I understood it.

I did a little more digging and found reference in a Known Error article to an NLU API /api/now/v1/nlu/getAllPublishedModels but couldn't find any documentation on that - or any reference to other methods besides getAllPublishedModels.

So I checked REST API Explorer and actually found another (or more likely the same/replacement) "NLU (Internal)" API, which seems like our best bet - most specifically the "test" method that it includes, which I presume invokes the same functionality that NLU Workbench does: 

POST https://[instance].service-now.com/api/now/nlu/test

Then I check to see if there's any documentation, but nope, nothing. From Google search results, I can see there used to be official API documentation - https://developer.servicenow.com/dev.do#!/reference/api/washingtondc/rest/openNLUrsc-POST - but for some reason it was taken down...

Then this 2022 post How to use NLU API? - ServiceNow Community asks how this API is used and somebody shares a different post in response... but that too is now dead 😞