Dialogflow

As a first step towards recipe recommendation, we want a user to be able to ask for a random recipe recommendation. The idea is that the agent would randomly select one of the recipes from its database and recommend that to its user. This may not seem particularly useful at this stage, when you only have implemented Capability 1: Greet, and Self-Identify. A user cannot yet have made any requests for specific features of a recipe. However, at a later stage, when a user can also already have made such specific feature requests, adding this capability makes more sense. In these cases, a user simply may not want to add any other feature requests and ask the agent to recommend an arbitrary recipe from those that satisfy the requests they have made thus far. We want to prepare the agent for doing just that already now. The first thing to do to enable this is to create another intent in your Dialogflow agent for requesting a (random) recipe recommendation. To create such an intent, you should follow the same steps as before:

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Prolog and Patterns

This section is about implementing the dialog management capabilities of the conversational agent but also about implementing the domain logic that the agent needs to be able to perform its task. As our conversational agent is a task-based agent for recipe recommendation, the conversational competence of our agent focuses on patterns and responses for recipe recommendation. The logic that we need to implement concerns the capabilities our agent needs to reason about user requests about recipes that are available in the agent’s database. We will first focus on adding some conversational capabilities for our agent to respond to a user request to provide a (random) recipe. As before, the approach to dialog management that we use here will require the definition of a pattern and the specification of a (textual) response to the user request. When we have completed that part, we will continue with the part focusing on implementing the reasoning capabilities for extracting such a recipe from the database in Prolog. This will require the definition of several rules for extracting a suitable recipe from the agent’s recipe database.

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This clause specifies that if there are no filters to apply (i.e., the filter list is empty), the output of this filtering of a list of RecipeIDs thus remains unchanged and is that same list of recipe identifiers RecipeIDs.

Visuals

Recipe recommendation page

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At this stage, for this capability, we will only provide code for a very basic skeleton page that provides the minimal functionality needed to implement the main requirement for this page: enable a user to talk to the agent using a microphone button. The design is kept minimal below and in the step-by-step walkthrough below we will only use a single and simple alert element to style the page. As the recipe recommendation page will be the first interaction point for users who are actually interested in finding a recipe, we leave it up to you to try and make this page more inviting and add clear and useful content that the agent will show. Note that we will also ask you to extend this page at a later stage when you are implementing Capability 5: Filter Recipes by Ingredients.

Step 1: Adding the head of a Prolog rule for a recipe recommendation page.

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The next page that we want you to add is a recipe confirmation page. At the end of the pattern enabling a user to request a (random) recipe, the agent inserts the a50recipeConfirm pattern ID in the agenda. No pattern has been added for this pattern ID yet, but because it will appear at the top level in the agent’s agenda, we can already create a confirmation page for the recipe that is selected. The idea is that this page allows the user to preview the recipe and indicate whether they are satisfied with the recipe (confirm) or not (disconfirm). To enable a user to make this decision, the main requirement for this page is that it shows the recipe’s name, and what the result of cooking the recipe will look like (a picture of the recipe). A second requirement is that the page shows a microphone button to enable the user to inform the agent about whether it wants to (dis)confirm the recipe. Note that at a later stage, we will ask you to extend the recipe confirmation page when you implement Capability 6: Filter by Number of Ingredients.

For the design, a https://www.w3schools.com/bootstrap4/bootstrap_cards.asp element seems a suitable element for styling the page. We will use it below to create a first (but still simple) recipe confirmation page with a basic recipe card. We will want to generate the following HTML code for this card:

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