Techniques related to a virtual agent conversation service are disclosed. The techniques include a method for improving performance of a virtual agent conversation system, comprising receiving one or more conversation trees, receiving a message from a user including a natural language description of an intended task, providing the message to a conversation provider, receiving an indication of an intent of the message and textual information related to the indication of the intent, determining an action to take based on the indication of the intent, perform the action to obtain an action result, determining a set of responses based on the action result, and providing a response of the set of responses to the virtual agent based on the action result for output to the user.