I got this question on my YouTube channel: Hi, I’m new to DF and really appreciate your videos. I totally agree with keeping the context lifespan to 1, as otherwise it makes the conversation really messy. I guess the only situation I have found that this falls down is here, where the default fallback intent then effectively deletes the context, causing re-prompting to fail. I have a complex conversation, and I want a general fallback intent that reprompts the user and maintains the context. Is there any way of creating that, as otherwise I am going to need a fallback for every single one of my (many) contexts. This is a very good question, and the answer is the usual […]
Build Better Dialogflow Bots
A systematic approach to building and analyzing your Dialogflow bot’s behavior will go a long way towards helping you develop better Dialogflow bots. In this article, I introduce the CTFS framework which will be very useful for analyzing your Dialogflow bot’s behavior. If you have used contexts in your Dialogflow agent, and have ever wondered why a completely different intent (than what you expected) matched the user query, you should read this article. A puzzle This is the first part of a series which introduces some theory about how Dialogflow works under the hood. First, here is a little puzzle: Before you move on to the next part, try and explain to yourself what is going on. Puzzle Explanation So […]
How to debug your Dialogflow bot
I recently got feedback from a reader. He was answering a question about a tool which Dialogflow should have but doesn’t. Debugging of dialog flow , which is very important tool that should be there Now, I don’t think you can “debug” Dialogflow by setting breakpoints the same way you would when writing code, at least not yet. But there are a few things you should learn about when you try to debug your Dialogflow bot. Learn the basics The first step is to learn Dialogflow itself systematically. It is a very good example of investing some additional time up front, and saving yourself hours/days/weeks in the future. In my view, the best way to learn Dialogflow systematically is to go […]
A MUST read article on Dialogflow training phrase quality
Recently, Google published a very interesting article on how you can assess the quality of the training phrases inside your Dialogflow agent. In my view, if you are at all interested in building a Dialogflow agent, it is a MUST READ. Note: You do need a fairly good programming background, plus some basic understanding of concepts such as “word vectors” to understand that article. So maybe the person who will read it is the programmer on your team. But here is the gist of it: you should maximize cohesion as well as separation in your intents. In this context, what is cohesion and what is separation? Instead of repeating what is already mentioned in that article, I will just highlight […]
Reader Question: Can Dialogflow initiate a message to user for a time based reminder?
I got this question recently in my comments: Can DialogFlow initiate a message to any user (in particular, in telegrams) on some Action (for example, send a reminder by time)? In the documentation, it seems to be described as https://dialogflow.com/docs/events/custom-events. I tried using different (via POST request or WebHook) methods, but I only get the response to ACTION in the response to the request: detectIntent, although I specify same session on which the telegram user is connected. But the user does not receive anything in the telegrams on the event, no message. Why? This is a good question, and you need to understand how Dialogflow’s 1-click integrations work. Remember that when using the default 1-click integration, there is already a sequence […]
Reader Question: Why not use followup intents but change context lifespan to one?
I received this question in my comments: Wouldn’t it be possible to use follow up intents, but modify the lifespan to 1 after it is created? That way yo get the same functionality as your work around, but Dialogflow still shows a nice tree with the related intents. This is actually not only a very good question, but one which actually requires quite a lot of thought (for you the bot developer). So to answer the question: Yes, that is correct. My Concerns But here are my concerns with this approach: Is it the right tool? Sometimes folks have a tendency to put everything into a followup tree structure, even when it isn’t the right tool for the problem. The […]
Can you solve the CIA puzzle?
No, not the Central Intelligence Agency. I mean Candidate Intent Ambiguity 🙂 A puzzle A while back, a coaching student of mine was facing an interesting problem. Agent ZIP file Can you figure out what the problem is? Download the agent ZIP file here and try and see if you can figure out the issue. The solution Want to understand what is going on here? Check out the Candidate Intent Ambiguity chapter in my Dialogflow Conversation Design course. Summary The Candidate Intent Ambiguity is one of the main reasons why your user’s phrases get mapped to an intent which is different from what you expected. (In contrast, it doesn’t have anything to do with the problem of the user’s phrase […]
Reader Question: How to add a specific response when the chatbot fails in general?
This is the question I got on my Drift bot: Hello Aravind, I want to add one specific response when chatbot fails in general. Is there a way to do that? Well, that’s a fairly easy one. Assuming, of course, that I understand the question fully 🙂 You need to use the Default fallback intent for this purpose. This would also be a good article to talk about Contextual Fallback intents, because a lot of people seem to miss this feature. Default Fallback Intent vs Contextual Fallback Intent Did you know that you can create fallback intents which have input contexts? First, go to the Intents list view and click on the vertical ellipsis. Then, click on the Create Fallback Intent. […]
Why chatbots fail
In this article, I am going to talk about the 3 reasons that I believe chatbots fail. But before we go there, let us distinguish technical failure and commercial failure. Technical vs commercial failure A good example of a technical success but commercial failure is the Segway. It was launched with a LOT of hype, and it actually lived up to the hype! That is, it was a compact, motor powered vehicle which could actually balance and autocorrect itself, and it did travel to the speeds which were announced. But it was not a commercial success for a lot of reasons which have already been discussed many times. So just because your chatbot doesn’t have a positive ROI doesn’t mean […]
Managing session-vars
When you are collecting a set of inputs from the user, you should use a context with a very large lifespan as a sort of a “session variable”. I refer to this as session-vars in many of my videos. There are three things you should remember when using session variables. 1 You should not add the session-vars to all intents For example, suppose you collect a set of inputs. You will add the session-vars as output context to the first intent which collects a single input value. And once you are done collecting the relevant information, you will send the data across to a webhook to process the collected data. 2 You should add a session-vars to all intents which […]