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Table of Contents
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Dialogflow

Tip

Before you start: make sure your MARBEL agent is connected to Dialogflow.

Note

Read more about creating intents and entities before you start on the DialogFlow: Create an Agent, Intents and Entities page.

Creating a Greeting Intent

Create an intent called greeting in your Dialogflow agent.

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Tip

Check that your greeting intent is working by using the microphone button in the test console on the DIalogflow console page. Try various phrases also using the test console and check whether what you say is recognized as a greeting intent.

Prolog and Patterns

Greeting pattern without self-introduction

We shall start by considering how a typical greeting pattern looks like. When the agent does not introduce itself, a very common greeting pattern could like look this:

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We have used the same name or label greeting that we used for the user’s move also for the agent’s move in the pattern that we defined. This makes sense conceptually because the moves are the same type of move, i.e. a greeting from one actor to another. The same intent label, however, should be handled very differently for the agent than for a user. Dialogflow should handle the natural language understanding (NLU) of a user’s move first by (transcribing the speech and then) classifying the move as an intent. In contrast, the MARBEL agent should handle the agent intent and make sure the agent generates natural language (NLG) text as output for a speech synthesizer. A user’s intent thus can be viewed as an input label whereas agent intents can be viewed as output or response labels. Below, we will see how we can provide texts for the agent to make its move in the responses.pl file. Because the same intent label for a user and for an agent are handled in very different places, there is no harm in using the same label either, and we can keep things conceptually simple.

Specifying the agent’s greeting

In the Prolog file responses.pl we determine what exactly the agent will say to initiate a move in the conversation or how it will respond to something a user said. The basic idea is to add natural language phrases, sentences, or text for each type of move the agent can make. In other words, we need to specify phrases for all the intent labels that occur in dialog moves in all patterns that are made by the agent. If there is no phrase specified at all for one of the agent’s possible dialog moves, the agent will not be able to perform that move…!

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Info

If you add only one text/2 fact for an intent label to the responses.pl file, your agent will quickly become boring (if not to your users it will soon enough start to bore you and your team members when you repeatedly need to test your agent!). To enable your agent to vary in what exactly it says when it makes a particular type of dialog move, all you need to do is to add more text/2 facts for an intent. The text_generator/2 predicate defined at the top of the responses.pl file will then randomly select one of these prhases for the agent to say.

Hear your agent say its first words

Warning

To test and hear something, you still need to do one more thing: In the dialog_init.mod2g file, add the c10 pattern name also to the agenda of the agent after start that is already in it (separate them by a comma, the agenda is a list!).

You can now Running your Conversational Agent again to hear your agent say its first opening words.

Note that unless the corresponding c10 pattern and the textual response have also beed added to the pattern.pl and reponses.pl file, your code will not yet work. Also make sure you not already added a name for your agent; the basic greeting pattern c10 assumes that the agent has no name yet!

Greeting with a self-introduction

Pattern C1.1: Opening Self-Identification (Agent)

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This pattern will be quite similar to the one above, but should include the intent label ​​'selfIdentification'. Add a list [_,_] predicate in the pattern list above for the new rule that tells the agent to self-identify. Also, note that the agent must have a name in order to self-identify.

Specifying the agent’s self-introduction

You and your team should think of a name for your agent. Feel free to be creative. We need to tell our agent its name somewhere. In dialog_init.mod2g, on line 40 you can add the name you came up with for your agent. Change the empty string in insert(agentName(''), for example, to insert(agentName('Bellabot').

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You should then return a sentence including the agent’s name as Txt.

Visuals

Opening Page (visuals for the c10 pattern)

When a user has visited the Start Page and clicked on the start button, your agent should start talking. The head page(c10, _, Html) for the rule you need to complete has been provided. This page should show your agent’s greeting, and introduce your agent by saying its name!

  1.  Consider the condition that needs to succeed when you generate this page (Hint: look at the start page rule body and how the first parameter of the page/3 predicate is used in that rule).

  2. Think about what you want to be on this page. It needs somewhere to show text to introduce your agent. For this, you can use a card or an alert, for example. This will be the first atom in your HTML code that we use in Step 3. The second atom should be HTML code with text(formatted) to introduce your agent, i.e. what you want to go on your alert or card. In Step 5 we need to format the HTML code by formating the Prolog string with ‘applyTemplate’. This means that in this second atom there should be a placeholder for the variable with the name of the agent. Read the Visual Support Guide for hints on how to do that.

  3. Use a predicate to combine the first atom and second atom you created in the previous step (check out the Visuals Guide for how to do this). What we created in HTML above is our template, and the predicate should return the variable Template.

  4. Now we need to get the agent's name in order to add it to our text. This knowledge should be somewhere in the agent's memory. Hint: Look at line 40 in dialog_init for the applicable predicate. Retrieve the name of the agent in a variable.

  5. Next, you should use the applyTemplate/3 predicate to add the agent’s name to our HTML code atom (which is also explained in the Visual Support Guide).

  6. Lastly, you should use the last variable that you used in the applyTemplate/3 predicate and use the html/2 predicate to convert your code snippet into a completed HTML page. This can be done by using html(YourCompleteHTMLCodeVariableHere, Html). Html is the variable that returns the page as you can see in the head of the rule.

Run It!

Add the c10 pattern to the agenda in dialog_init.mod2g file. If you run your conversational agent, you should hit your start page, press the button, and then your agent should introduce itself. Then you should unmute yourself by clicking the microphone icon in the top left corner, give Google Chrome permission to use your microphone, and return the greeting, by saying hello or anything else you come up with that sounds like a greeting. Check if your agent understood what you said and classified what you said into a greeting intent by inspecting the terminal in which you launched the SIC server:

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