How to Make a Bot

Manage Conversations & Settings

Using the Flow Bot Builder you can add small talk module and also tweak few configurations for the bot like the fallback message or NLP threshold etc. Let's look at these in this guide.

1. Manage conversations
2. Settings

Manage conversations

Use this section to configure your Bot responses based on certain user messages, that can be mentioned at anytime during the conversation. An example of this is small talk phrases like Hi, hello, good morning, etc. In addition, there could be specific user statements like “how do I pay” or “start over” for which, your bot can redirect users to specific flows.

For text inputs & responses, add user variations to allow for more varied user input match and random bot responses to keep the conversation fresh & avoiding the bot to repeat itself to often.

To add a user message, you need to click on the Manage conversations icon from the menu on the left.

You will get this screen to add the user messages and Bot responses, which can be a bot message or calling a flow

You can add the expected user query(user intent) on the left and the bot response to that query on right. You can also add variations to the user query or the bot response by clicking “Add variations”.

NOTE:

1.    Adding variations to the user query means that the bot should consider them all as the same query from the user and send the appropriate bot response back.

2.    Adding variations to the bot responses means that the bot can send any one of those responses randomly to the user.

You can also add more keywords or smalltalk phrases by clicking on the “+ Add More” button. Once you have added your required list of words and phrases, click on “Done” to save.

Turning off Smalltalk

When you add smalltalk to your bot via the Manage conversations section, Gupshup's NLP is called every time to match the intents from the user. This might cause your bot to break in cases where you are expecting an open-ended response from the user.

For example:

In a specific flow of your bot, you want users to enter their email address. Now an email address is different for different users. With Smalltalk added to the bot Gupshup's NLP will be called and since the email address will not match the example entered by you in the bot script, your bot will send out the default failure message.

There is a way to stop this from happening. You can turn off the Smalltalk for that specific flow, so that the NLP engine is not called and bot accepts any input from the user.

Rule for Turning off Smalltalk

1. You can only turn this off for a bot state with a single child state associated.
2. You can only do this for a bot state with message type as text.

How to turn Smalltalk off

Select the bot state before the user state from the tree view for which smalltalk has to be turned off. Then in the script designer hover or click on the down arrow button. You should see options as displayed in the screenshot below

click on the chat like option beside the edit button and you are done. This is the icon from when smalltalk is OFF for that state

Settings

To access the Settings, click on this icon from the menu on the left.

Threshold:

As the Flow Bot Builder is powered by Gupshup's NLP framework, this threshold is a way to configure the acceptable maxintent score for the user intents(user says).
The default value is set to 0.2 but you can change this to any value between 0-1 as per your need.

Fallback response

When your bot doesn't understand the user message, it can either respond with a text message or redirect user to a specific flow. A good fallback response guides the user to rephrase their query or gives them a message with buttons to move forward in the conversation.

Re-state query

Typically, in most conversations, when a person replies with an incorrect or inappropriate response, we tend to restate our query, to ensure they get it the second time round. Today, when a bot doesn?t understand the user intent, it throws the Fallback response and waits for the user?s message. This can be confusing to the user at times, especially with voice bots.

To address this conversational dilemma, you can always have the Bot restate its message in case of an incorrect user response. When this option is enabled, the bot will always repeat the query / message to the user after responding with the Fallback response.

Google Analytics

You can enable Google's analytics by toggling the on/off switch and adding the Tracking ID of the Google analytics.

Debugger

By default, the “Logs” tab on the dashboard for your bot with Flow Bot Builder will not generate any logs. You can turn on the logs for debugging by toggling the on/off switch.

Peristence Menu

This feature is primarily built for Facebook messenger and Gupshup?s web widget. Users can configure a persistence menu with buttons that link back to a specific flow (postback), open a web URL or create a sub-menu. The persistence menu, along with sub-menu?s can be maximum of 3 (level 1) X 5 (level 2) X 5 (level 3) buttons.

Once you?ve configured your Persistence menu, use the ?Get Configuration? button to copy the JSON code snippet. When publishing your bot to Facebook messenger and web widget, paste it in the configuration

    

This will only be a one time activity, as once your bot is published to these channels, to make any further updates, you will just need to deploy your changes from Flow bot builder and the latest persistence menu changes will reflect live on these channels.