As a bot developer, you typically create a task to resolve one primary user intent. Yet, user conversations can branch into related intents (follow-up or sub-intents) as a part of the primary intent.
Let us take a look into this sample conversation for a Book Flights bot:
Bot: Hi, how may I help you today?
User: Hey, what flight options have I got from LA to NYC?
Bot: Sure, let me know the travel date.
User: Wait a minute, will it rain there this Sunday?
The primary intent of this conversation is to book flight tickets. But the user wants to know the weather forecast before completing the booking, which is a valid use case.
User Intent Nodes help you add root intent or follow-up (or sub-intents) to your dialog tasks. The flow for a follow-up intent is built within the same dialog task using transitions, and cannot be linked to external tasks. When the execution of a follow-up intent is completed, the conversation flow continues within the same dialog tasks based on the transitions you add.
Note: To start a new Dialog Task from an existing one, you can use the Dialog Task nodes.
Set-Up
Setting up an user intent node in a dialog task involves the following steps:
Add Node
- Open the dialog task to add the user intent node.
- Add user intent node in the designated place. For steps in adding nodes, refer here.
- The user intent window is displayed with the Component Properties tab selected by default.
Component Properties
The configurations you set up or edit in the Component Properties tab reflects in all the dialog tasks that use this node. These settings are the same for Intent and Sub-intent nodes.
- On the Component Properties tab, under the General Settings, you can modify
- the Name and
- Description.