I am trying to jump to a random question with followup event, and at the same time store the question number in the context. But dialogflow only jumps to the event without storing the question number. Is there a way to do followup event and store a context in one intent?
app.intent('Quiz - random', (conv) => {
let rand = Math.floor(Math.random() * quiz_len) + 1;
conv.data.current_qns = rand;
conv.followup(`quiz-question${rand}`);
});
Not really. The point of using conv.followup() is to make it as if the new Intent is the one that was actually triggered by the user. Remember - Intents represent what the user is saying not what you're replying with. You can include a parameter with the redirect, which I guess you can use to send the question, but this still would be the equivalent of a parameter sent by the user.
It isn't entirely clear why you feel you need to direct to a different Intent. Is it just to ask the question as part of the reply? Go ahead and ask it in the Intent handler you're in and store the number in the context directly.
Update
You've indicated in the comments that you want to structure things so you have a "random dispatcher" that then redirects to an Intent to ask a question, and that Intent has a Followup Intent that accepts the right answer (and possibly ones that deal with wrong answers).
This requires you to build a lot of extra Intents for all the various questions, and then the conditions on each question. This requires you to re-build this structure every time you want to add a new question.
Dialogflow works very well to navigate the structure of a conversation - so you don't need to use it to navigate specific questions, answers, and responses. Remember - Intents model what a user says in broad terms, not how our agent responds.
Here is a structure that might work better:
There is an Intent that handles the user asking for a random question. The Intent fulfillment for this (ie - the handler function in your webhook) does the following:
Selects a question
Sets a context to indicate which question is being asked
Sends the context and the question to the user
There is another Intent that handles user responses. All user responses. If this is a multiple choice question, you can set very specific phrases, but otherwise you may need to make this a Fallback Intent that has the context specified above as an Input Context.
Your handler for this compares the answer.
If correct, you clear the context, say so, and ask if they want another question. (Which would then loop to the Intent specified in step 1.)
If incorrect, you make sure the context is still valid and tell them they're wrong. Possibly increase a counter so you don't let them guess indefinitely.
This means you're only building two Intents that handle the question itself. You should add a few more. Here are a few to think about:
What happens if the user doesn't say anything at all? The "No Input" scenario should be handled differently than a bad answer.
If you're asking a multiple choice question, perhaps you'll use a list and need to handle a list response.
Finally, if you're using a list, you may want to do something fancy and use Dialogflow's API to set a Session Entity Type for just that question. This allows you to set what you're expecting (with some aliases) for what is correct and incorrect, and then use a Fallback Intent for the context to say that what the user said didn't make sense.
Related
I want to ask the users a few questions in my welcome intent and depending on their answers give them a particular output.
My problem is that, once the user answers the first question, the agent exits my welcome intent and tries to match with the next intent.
I thought I could solve this by matching it back to the welcome intent.
So ideally it should have gone like this :
Welcome intent -> 1st question -> user answer -> Welcome intent ->2nd question -> and so on
But actually this happens :
Welcome intent -> 1st question -> user answer ->Welcome intent -> 1st question
It will keep asking the first question.
To solve this , I started maintaining a flag for each question.
If question 1 was answered I would set its flag true and then use it to skip the first question when the welcome intent is matched for the second time.
This is a very convoluted way to do it and probably far from the best way to do it.
Can anyone point me in the right direction to implement it?
Thank you.
Edit : I have given up my old method. Let me explain what I want to do and then I can get guidance on the way I should implement it.
I have 16 different outputs and I would like to show one of them to the user depending on their answer to 4 questions. Each question will only have two answers as options and depending on the option chosen by the user for each question , I will pick one of the 16 outputs and display it to the user.
How do I accomplish this using diaglogflow node.js?
First of all remember that an Intent captures what the user says or does and not what you do with that information or how you reply to it. That part is best handled by your fulfillment. While we can use Contexts to limit which Intents will be considered for a user response they are probably most useful in this case to store your state and keep track of which questions have been asked and answered.
Under this scheme, your Intents remain responsible for capturing input and your fulfillment examines this input, changes state based on this input, and sends a reply based on the new state (what it needs to ask next). If the user's responses will be mostly the same (free form, or from the same set of phrases), you can even use the same Intent to capture this input and the fulfillment would use the state and input to determine what logic to execute. If you need different types of input, and thus different Intents, their handlers can still call common functions to do the processing and change the state/reply.
This is further discussed in Thinking for Code: Design conversations not logic
You can use the concept of the follow-up intents in Dialogflow Console to create a chain of questions/answers.
Here is an example of my chain of questions/answers:
Though I still strongly advise you to study also how input/output context works. Especially if you want to collect all user reply parameters in the one final fulfillment of the last step to avoid storing the user inputs in fulfillments attached to every intent of the chain.
I've got a few intents. They all just use a single fallback intent and this fallback intent has the webhook enabled.
In the fallback function what I was hoping to do is switch on the output context and then determine what should happen next depending on which intent the fallback came from.
But the line
var context = request.body.queryResult.outputContexts;
When debugged to the console gets output:
[ { name: 'projects/xxxxproj-xxxx/agent/sessions/xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx/contexts/xxxxxxx-context' } ]
For the switch statement i just want the last bit with the xxxxx-context. Am I going to have to split that up to get the output context?
In the "Diagnostic Info" section I am a bit surprised there is no reference to the intent from which the fallback came and the only way to work it out seems to be using the outputcontext but as show above that is quite a long string.
Thanks
Yes, the context name is just the last part of that path. Most libraries will take care of that for you, but if you're working with the JSON directly, you need to do this yourself.
There is no reference to "the Intent from which the fallback came" because this isn't quite the model of what an Intent is. Intents represent what the user has said or done, not the current state of the conversation or where you are in the conversation. That current state is represented by Contexts, should you choose to set them.
In that sense, how you use the contexts can vary. They can store parameters, so are a good way to keep information between rounds of a conversation, and you can use them the way you are - to see what state the conversation is in general. But they also take on additional uses when defining Intents.
In an Intent definition, the Intent will only be triggered if all the Contexts listed in the Input Context field are set (ie - have a lifespan greater than 0). Dialogflow uses this when it makes followup Intents, for example, and it is common so you can do things such as have "help" trigger different Intents based on Context. In an Output Context, it will automatically capture all of the parameters specified in the Intent, including those filled in by the user's response, so this can be an easy way to remember what the user has said from round to round.
To answer your question in the comments - it doesn't specifically say which Intents were previously triggered, or which most recently, although if you're consistent in how you use your Output Contexts and what lifespan you give them, you can use it this way. What it does say is in what state your conversation is in, which is generally much better anyway.
Remember - Intents represent what a user has said or done. It doesn't represent anything else about the conversation. Only the state of the system represents that, and one tool we have to control that state is through Contexts.
I'm looking to POC a small Google Action that gives a decision based on a few yes/no answers the user must answer first. Effectively I need to:
Ask a question
Store the result
Ask the next question
Store results
* Repeat until all yes/no answers given then end the conversation with a decision using saved values in the conversation.
Ongoing though I would like to add help to any of the questions. So the user could say "I don't understand", "Can you give an example", "Help" and it would give an example to help the user answer yes or no to the question they are up to.
After playing around through the labs it looks like I would do this by creating an Intent for my end decision and then nest a bunch of follow up intents within to gather all my yes/no answers. I feel this would get messy though as it would be a huge chain of them.
Is there a better way to design it?
Yes, using Followup Intents would be messy. It is almost never the right approach to the problem. Remember that Intents capture what the user has said and not what you are doing with what they have said.
If the questions are truly just yes/no, I would setup six Intents:
However you trigger the start of the questioning. This might be your Welcome Intent, or it may be something else.
Saying "yes" and equivalent
Saying "no" and equivalent
Asking for help
Asking to repeat the question
A fallback Intent that handles other unexpected input
When questioning begins, your fulfillment would setup a Context that contains the current question being asked and the responses for the questions so far. Answering yes or no would update the responses, determine what question to ask next, save this in the context, and ask it. Help, repeat, and the fallback Intent would respond with appropriate information based on the current question.
I'm trying to make a simple dialogflow conversation. I have made a simple conversation to ask a person who they are trying to call and then says if a person is available / unavailable, which is just a text reply. When a person is unavailable I have potentially 3 actions the user can do, leave a voicemail, redirect to a colleague or wait until the person is available.
The message I would return is
"I'm sorry nameOfPerson is not available, would you like to leave a voicemail message, redirect to a colleague or wait until nameOfPerson is available?"
Which works, but how can I make it so that lets say there is no voicemail the intent only response with, "I'm sorry nameOfPerson is not available, would you like to redirect to a colleague or wait until nameOfPerson is available?"
Currently the only way I see to fix this is making 7 intents with all different contexts like:
Intent1: voicemailContext
Intent2: redirectContext
Intent3: voicemailContext, redirectContext
Intent4: waitingContext
Intent5: WaitingContext, redirectContext
Intent6: waitingContext, voicemailContext
intent7: waitingContext,redirectContext, voicemailContext
All that work for just a small adjustment seems way to complicated. Also currently I'm sending those options in a call which I would much rather not since people could also just say those options and get a match
Dialogflow is very poor at handling logic. You can sorta do it, as you've seen, but this does lead to overly complicated models. One thing to remember that might help with this is that Intents are good at modeling what the user says, but that you're still responsible for what you do with that.
Better in many cases is to put the logic in a fulfillment webhook. This lets your code determine what the best response is and send that response. Depending how you want to structure your replies, you have a few other options:
You can send a context back in the reply. This would limit which Intents can get triggered when the user replies.
Another approach is to only have one Intent for the reply, but to use Entities to represent what sorts of things they can do. Then have your fulfillment, again, determine if they have given you a valid or invalid reply and respond accordingly.
I search how to jump an intent, i have one topic with several context, i would like for my agent, he can give an answer to question 3 and get the context of the question 1 and 2, without ask the question 2, like this
Is this possible?
What isn't clear from your example is how you expect the conversation to "jump over" the second question. But keep this in mind:
Intents represent what the user says, and not how you reply.
Your fulfillment can handle input any way that makes sense at that moment and keep track of the state of your conversation. Based on what the user says and the current state, you can reply and prompt for something else.
If you have Input Context set for an Intent, that Intent will only be valid if all the Input Contexts are currently active. You can't have an Intent that will trigger if only one of them is.
The workaround for this is to have more than one Intent, each with the same training phrase, but with different Input Contexts. Then, in your fulfillment, you can either register the same Intent Handler for both, or have both Intent Handlers call the same function to actually do the work.