How It Works
Now that we have our template operational let's take a look at how it all works.
In this section, we go through all the main conversations and explain how they work together to provide the overall experience.
Welcome Conversation
Welcome Scene
The Welcome conversation has just one scene with a number of turns.
Let's walk through each turn so that it is clear what their job is in the overall conversation.
Welcome Turn
This is a starting turn that holds the outgoing intent from the application that welcomes the user to the scene.
The message has two buttons associated with it that will activate intents that are in other turns within the same scene. We will mention these intents as we examine the other turns.
End Chat Turn
This is an open turn that captures the intent intent.core.TurnEndChat - this is an intent that is generated when the user clicks on the end chat button on webchat. It is actually what in OpenDialog we term a cascading intent in that when the intent is matched the OpenDialog conversation engine will first look for intent.core.TurnEndChat then intent.core.SceneEndChat and then intent.core.ConversationEndChat before breaking out to the top of the scenario and look for intent.core.endChat . This cascade of intents allows us to react to the user differently in different contexts. This is an implementation of the Contextual End Chat Pattern.
Prompt Question Turn
The prompt question turn is supposed to be activated whenever the user says that they have a question (e.g. when they click on the "I've got a question button". The response from the application will be to invite the user to ask their question.
Turn No Match
The Turn No Match turn is activated when interpreters fail to map the user's request to an available intent. It allows us to deal with a no match within the scene. This means that we can retain context and help the user recover more easily than breaking out of the scene and ending in the global No Match Conversation. This is an implementation of the Contextual No Match Pattern.
FAQ Turn
The FAQ Turn handles FAQ questions within the Welcome Scene. It is an implementation of the Contextual FAQ Pattern. The incoming user intent name is intent.dialogflow.faq and that should be mapped within your Dialogflow interpreter setup to the knowledge base intent as shown in the figure below. This mapping will convert any Knowledge.Knoweldgebase.* intent from Dialogflow intent the intent.dialogflow.faq intent in OpenDialog.
At the same time within the outgoing intent message, you will want to embed the response from the Dialogflow knowledge base using an empty custom message and adding the attribute from the user context that contains the Dialogflow message
The end result is that you will be able to wrap question responses in a customized message based on the conversation context.
Next Turn
The Next Turn captures all the intents from the user that could move the conversation to the next phase. There are three possibilities. The user might click on the "Let's go" button, the user might type something that maps to the userContinueNLU intent (e.g. "let's do it", "let's find shoes", etc) or the user might dive straight into a more specific request such as "Looking for men's shoes" that will active the intent.shoebot.provideRunnerExperience intent.
Help Request Turn
The Help Request Turn is an implementation of the Contextual Help Pattern, it allows us to capture a request for help within the welcome scene and respond appropriately for this conversational context.
Gather Experience Conversation
The Gather Experience Conversation has two scenes. The User Profile scene where we collect the necessary information from the user while also providing access to FAQ questions, etc and the Pronation Scene where we explain to the user what is Pronation. The Pronation scene is what we consider a "sidebar" scene, where we break out from the core scene (User Profile) to handle a specific piece of information before returning back to User Profile.
User Profile Scene
You'll notice that the User Profile scene has a few turns that are similar to the Welcome scene. The FAQ turn, Turn No Match turn and End Chat turn are all there to handle similar issues as before so we will not go over them. We will, instead, focus on the Welcome User, Provide Experience, Change Experience and Work out pronation turns.
Welcome User Turn
The Welcome User turn is a starting turn with just one intent from the application - welcome the user to the User Profile scene. This intent has five messages associated with it. Which message will be shown to the user depends on how much information we already have from the user about their request.
To explore the approach a bit further: our goal is to provide a natural way to hold a conversation, if the user chooses to do so. To gather details from the user, we prompt the user in an open-ended way: "Tell me how often you tend to run, pronation, size and whether you are looking for men's or women's shoes." We are thus looking for 4 pieces of information: frequency, pronation, size and men's/women's. An open-ended prompt like this sounds natural and provides the user an opportunity to reply in a natural way. However, it is quite likely that a user will not provide all the requested information in their reply. Once we receive whatever information they give us, we parse that out, and will then prompt specifically for any information that is still missing. This is the reason why we have the five different messages in this turn.
As an alternative, we could have taken the user through each question one by one, instead of providing an open-ended prompt. This would have resulted in a more stilted and flowchart-like conversation, where we'd ask: "how often do you run", followed by "what size are you looking for", followed by the other direct questions.
The screenshots below illustrate a couple of different versions of the current conversation. In the screenshot to the left, we don't have any information yet about the user as a runner. In the screenshot to the right, the user dove right in and supplied two pieces of information before we even asked them the open-ended question. The flexibility to accommodate these and other variations of the interaction makes this a more natural conversation style.
Any time we gather a piece of information from the user, we store this in the user context using attributes.
From a conversation map perspective, the Request Intent from the application is the same, but the way that intent is expressed through the question depends on how much information we have.
We have a total of five messages. A general one if we don't have any relevant info and another four messages, each focusing on one of the four pieces of information we want to collect. Each of those four messages has a condition that checks to verify if that piece of information exists in our user context.
Provide Experience Turn
After we've welcomed the user to this scene, we are now ready to collect any other information that is missing (or handle FAQ questions, etc). The turn that collects this additional information is the Provide Experience Turn.
Request Intents: There are two requests intents that are meant to handle information coming through from the user. The first one is the one you should configure with an NLU interpreter, while the second one is the one we use for button-based responses.
Note: You can use an NLU interpreter to interpret a button response (we will send the text on the button to the NLU interpreter) but if you are setting values explicitly with buttons it can be more efficient to just use the internal OpenDialog interpreter.
Response Intents: The response intents are where we decide whether we are going to ask a follow-up question or whether we are ready to show the user some shoes. The first intent "Ready to see some shoes" has a transition to the Welcome To Recommendations Scene in the Recommendations conversation. This intent will be selected only if all the conditions return true.
If the conditions do not evaluate to true we move on to the second possible intent response which is the "Follow-up question". The "Follow-up question" intent, similarly to the intent in the welcome turn has a number of messages associated with it each one with a condition based on the attribute information that is missing.
Through the simple interaction between these two intents, we achieve what in other systems is referred to as slot filling or form filling. We will return the user to this turn and keep asking relevant questions until we have all the information we need. Once we have all the information we can transition the user on, continuing the conversation.
Handling FAQs or other interactions and returning to the Provide Experience Turn
There is one other technique that this scene uses to keep the conversation focused on collecting any pieces of missing information. When a user asks an FAQ question, what we want to do is provide the answer to the FAQ question but then continue with the information collection that is the main objective of this conversation.
The way we achieve this is through virtual intents. When a user asks an FAQ question we expect the FAQ turn to match and the answer to be provided as usual. However, once that turn plays itself out rather than returning control to the user we fire a virtual intent by defining it on the response intent of the FAQ turn.
A virtual intent instructs the conversation engine to omit that intent (as if the user said an utterance that was then interpreted to that intent). Once an intent is omitted the normal flow takes on from there and the conversation engine will do whatever it was going to do if the user had said that intent.
In this case, the implication of the virtual intent is that the Provide Experience turn will be activated once more and the application will reply in whatever way is appropriate given the context. The message from the application will be appended to the FAQ answer and the whole series will be delivered to the user.
Virtual intents can be extremely powerful in that they can allow us to reactivate entire parts of the conversation and they mimic how human conversation develops. The application is essentially saying "I get that you asked me something different, I will reply to that but then I am also going to continue based on the reply I would have given you if you had not veered off the main objective of the conversation!" The screenshots below show you some examples of virtual intents in action. You see the answers to FAQ questions and then the follow-up coming from the Provide Experience turn.
Change Experience Turn
The Change Experience Turn is there to cater to the user potentially saying that they want to change one of the pieces of information they have offered. If the user says something such as "I would like to change something", this turn will be activated and we will reply letting the user know that it is ok to provide the new information.
In reality, the user doesn't need to ask to change something, they can simply provide the new information and because of the way we collect new information or update existing information through the Provide Experience turn the application will react normally. For example, the user might say "I want a size 8" and then say "actually make it a size 9" and the conversation would flow naturally.
Work Out Pronation Turn
At some point in this specific example we introduce the user to the concept of pronation. This is a term used to describe how the foot rolls each time it lands and can be used to suggest the right shoe. Since pronation may be a term the user is not familiar with we have a turn that will be activated if the user asks "What is pronation". The intents within this turn will transfer the user to the Pronation scene within the conversation where the term is explained as well as the process for how to determine pronation for yourself.
Pronation Scene
As you can see from the pronation scene the user is introduced to the concept and then guided through how to work out pronation by determining their feet pattern or they can skip the process. Whatever the specific path through this scene they will then be taken back to the User Profile scene.
Recommendations Conversation
The Recommendations Conversation is made up of two scenes. There is the "Welcome To Recommendations" scene and the "Provide Recommendations" Scene.
Welcome To Recommendations Scene
We transition to the "Welcome to Recommendations" scene from the "User Profile" scene once we have enough information to show the user some products. The objective of this scene is to give the user one last chance to change some information or ask FAQ questions before we show them the products.
As you can see from the figure above the scene has a number of possible starting turns (which are also open turns), this is because the transition from the previous scene happens on an Application intent - so this scene can open with a number of different user intents.
Provide Recommendations Scene
Once the user confirms their choices we can then move them to the "Provide Recommendations" scene. The objective of this scene is to show the recommendations and then collect the user's choice. Throughout, the user can still ask FAQ questions or change some of the parameters.
Provide Recommendations Turn
The Provide Recommendations Turn is the key turn here. The application runs an action to retrieve some product information and then presents that to the user.
Currently, this is somewhat artificially split on shoe type and the attributes returned in the action are hard-coded. When you are implementing your own actions you can have an appropriate setup to return the information you need.
The message that displays the shoes is a list message. An important element here is how we use the <value> field to set the attribute called selection to one. This could then be used through an action in order to retrieve further information about the selected product to customise the rest of the messages.
Purchase Conversation
Collect Details Scene
Once the user has selected a product we move to the Purchase conversation and specifically the "Collect Details" scene. The objective of this scene is to a. collect details using a form message and b. allow the user to review and change those details. This is achieved by the interplay of the two turns. The "Get Details" turns presents a form message that the user can fill in and submit while the "Confirm Details" turn provides a summary of the submitted data and gives the user a way back to the form to change anything.
The reason form details can be changed is because each field is stored in the User context and the form message is set up to replace field values with attributes from the user context, if those attributes are present
This concludes the explanation of the Product Chooser template.
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