Venue-specific goodbye with clean hangup

When the agent needs to say a specific goodbye and then hang up, a common mistake is relying on the LLM to produce the closing utterance. The LLM may add its own filler (“Thank you for calling, goodbye!”) before the function executes, resulting in two closing statements — or the wrong one playing.

The fix is to return the closing utterance directly from a function, combined with hangup: True. The function controls exactly what is said and when the call ends.

The problem

# In a topic action — don't do this for goodbyes
actions: |-
  Thank the caller and say goodbye.
  Use {{fn:hang_up_call}} to end the call.

The LLM speaks its own goodbye first, then the function executes. You end up with two closing statements.

The solution

Return the utterance and hangup from the function itself. The function speaks the closing message and ends the call atomically — no LLM turn in between.

Files involved

functions/goodbye_and_hang_up.py        ← closing utterance + hangup
config/variant_attributes.yaml         ← per-site closing messages (optional)
topics/Goodbye.yaml                     ← triggers the function

goodbye_and_hang_up.py

from _gen import *  # <AUTO GENERATED>


@func_description(
    "Called when the caller is ready to end the call. "
    "Speaks the closing message and hangs up."
)
def goodbye_and_hang_up(conv: Conversation):
    # Use a variant attribute for site-specific closings, or a plain string for a single site.
    # getattr guards against AttributeError if the attribute is missing for the current variant.
    default_closing = "Thanks for calling. Goodbye!"
    closing = getattr(conv.variant, "closing_message", default_closing) if conv.variant else default_closing
    return {
        "utterance": closing,
        "hangup": True,
    }

Goodbye.yaml

enabled: true
example_queries:
  - Goodbye
  - That's all I need
  - Thanks, bye
  - I'm done
  - No, nothing else
content: ""
actions: |-
  Use {{fn:goodbye_and_hang_up}} to close the call.
  Do not say anything before calling the function.

The ‘do not say anything’ instruction

Including “Do not say anything before calling the function” in the topic action suppresses the LLM’s tendency to add its own closing line before the function fires. The utterance in the function return value is what the caller hears.

Variant attribute for site-specific closing messages

If different locations need different goodbyes, add a closing_message attribute to config/variant_attributes.yaml. All variants and attributes are defined in this single file.

variants:
  - name: london
  - name: new_york
    is_default: true

attributes:
  - name: closing_message
    values:
      london: "Thanks for calling the London store. Goodbye!"
      new_york: "Thanks for calling the New York store. Have a great day!"

Then access it in the function via conv.variant.closing_message as shown above. Every variant must have a value for every attribute — leave it as an empty string if a variant has no custom closing.

is_default may be reassigned on push

The platform controls which variant is the default. After a push and pull, the is_default assignment in your local file may differ from what you wrote — the server picks the canonical default. This does not affect runtime behavior, but expect the value to change on round-trip.

Testing variants

Use the --variant flag with poly chat to verify that each variant produces the correct closing message:

poly chat --variant london
poly chat --variant new_york

The agent should end each session with the closing message configured for that variant. If conv.variant is None (for example, if no variants are pushed yet), the function falls back to the default string.

--variant resolves against the deployed environment

--variant looks up the variant name in the environment you are chatting against (default: main in sandbox). If you pushed variant_attributes.yaml on a feature branch but have not merged it yet, the variant names will not exist in sandbox and the flag will have no effect. Merge the branch first — with poly branch merge or through Agent Studio — then run poly chat --variant <name>.

Related pages

Functions reference

Return values, utterance, hangup, and control flow.

Variants

Per-site configuration using variant attributes.

Return values reference (platform)

All supported return shapes — utterance, hangup, combined dicts, and transition objects.

Variant management (platform)

How variant attributes are defined, routed, and accessed via conv.variant.