Digressions

Module7 : Understanding Digressions

Welcome to the seventh module of how to build chatbots. At this point, you should have a solid understanding of what context variables and slots bring to the table.

There is still one problem we're facing that we don't have a solution for yet. Consider the following interaction. The user asks the chatbot for some flower recommendations. The slot will ask for what occasion. Instead of replying with an occasion, the user decides to ask about hours of operation. The slot will continue to pester the user, asking for the occasion and ignoring other questions from the user. Even though technically the chatbot knows how to answer such questions.

The problem is that required slots won't quit asking their question until an acceptable answer has been provided and stored in a context variable. One option we have to make the interaction less obnoxious is to configure the not found section of a slot. Found and not found sections allow us to specify what the slot will say to the end-user when they reply with an acceptable answer and when they don't, respectively.

Typically you'll use the found section to thank the user for answering your question, or just leave it blank as it is by default. More interestingly, however, we can use the not found section to make asking the same question again less awkward. In other words, we can soften the blow of ignoring their second question by apologizing for having to ask the question again. Here's a practical example of how configuring the not found section of a slot can make the interaction a little smoother. You'll notice that when the user asks us an unrelated question while the slot is asking for the specific occasion, we don't just repeat the question verbatim. In this case, we say something like "Sorry to ask again, but what occasion would you like flower recommendations for?" It comes across as significantly more empathetic and less robotic, even though technically we're still asking the same question. This is an improvement, but wouldn't it be great to be able to answer the a side question we received from the user and then come back to the original question? That's what a human agent would do in most circumstances. It turns out this is possible thanks to digressions. We can allow a slot to jump to a different node after having asked the mandatory question. We can specify that other nodes can return back to an originating slot after answering the user's aside question. Let's see a practical example of how this would work. When the user ignores our requests for specific occasion, asking our chatbot to provide store hours instead, digressions allow us to jump to the node that handles hours of operations. Since that node has a slot too, that slot will ask its own question about which city are the store hours for. Once the user replies with Toronto, the node will provide the information to the user can return to the original node where the slot will ask about the occasion once again. This is a workflow that works quite well and makes our chatbot come across as smarter and friendlier.

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Taught by: Antonio Cangiano, Engineering Manager and AI Specialist

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