Team Contribution

During this week, as a complete team you will select three recipes for the conversational agent from cooking.pl, to work out further as subteams for recipe selection, visual support and recipe instruction. In addition, you will set up the initial version of the cooking assistant, by creating a Dialogflow agent (See here). The Recipe Selection team will focus on the start of the conversation, enabling the assistant to greet and to have the user select one of the three recipes, while the Recipe Instruction team will focus on the subsequent instruction of the three recipes and enable a capability check by the user. The Visual Support team will incorporate visuals to enrich the conversation. More details about the separate tasks of the three subteams are given below.

Recipe Selection

This section entails the tasks to be completed by the Recipe Selection team. It will mainly involve the steps to have the user select a certain recipe from the knowledge base provided as cooking.pl. For the recipes, multiple websites are available. For this course, we aim more or less straightforward one-pot recipes that can be made in a linear, step-by-step fashion. Therefore, simpler recipes are extracted from this website and are available in the file cooking.pl.

Opening the conversation by greeting

• The agent should open the conversation with a greeting, and by sharing its name (self-identify). To achieve this, add the corresponding C1 opening patterns in the patterns.pl file and choose a name for your chatbot.

• Check out the patterns.pl file as it contains additional instruction details. An opening pattern should be selected when the session history is still empty. Make sure that the agent self-identifies by the corresponding pattern only when an agentName/1 behavioral parameter is set.

• You should also introduce a greeting intent in your Dialogflow agent to allow the user to respond to the agent's greeting. Click here for instructions on how to create an intent in your Dialogflow Agent.

Enabling recipe selection

• The initial version of the GOAL agent will immediately start instructing a pasta recipe, while it should only start instructing a recipe after a user request. In the coming weeks you will enable the user to choose for a recipe by specifying particular recipe features. For now, we will assume that the user knows about the different recipes to pick from, and directly mentions the name of a recipe of choice. The capability check, allowing the user to ask what the agent can do, may also be used to have the agent mention the available recipes.

• The first thing to do is to make sure the agent is able to recognize recipe names. To recognize which recipe the user is talking about, in your Dialogflow agent create an entity recipe and add the (shorthand) names of the recipes from cooking.pl (possibly with different variations of the recipe names). Also, add an intent recipeRequest to your Dialogflow agent and integrate these recipe names as entities.

• Now add a pattern a50recipeName to the patterns.pl file of your GOAL agent. Again, additional instructions are given in the comments of the file. As a final step, add the pattern to the agent's agenda. Make sure the agent's memory is initially empty, and check if the pattern is performed by testing your agent.

Choose Recipe Features

• A recipe can have multiple features, like their name, ingredients, taste, country of origin, and cooking techniques. Your task here is to think of the three features you want to use to select a recipe (to be incorporated in week 2 and 3).

• The best way to do this is to do role-playing, where one person is the cooking assistant, and the other person is the user. The user will inquire into the recipes to choose from the 60 available ones, by asking for characteristics (like recipes that are the main dish or contain fish). Note that it does not necessarily have to result in one of the three recipes that were chosen to work out further.

• Repeat these role-playing conversations a couple of times, and document well how the conversation was conducted. This will not only give inspiration for the recipe features to include in your project, but may also reveal some typical conversation patterns to be used in the design of the agent (in patterns.pl).

Recipe Instruction

This section enlists the tasks to be completed by the Recipe Instruction team. The main focus is to work with instructions related to a selected recipe.

Enable Instructions of Recipes

The initial version of the cooking assistant spits out all the recipe steps at once. This should be changed to allow the user to indicate he or she has completed the step, which at a later point should also allow the user to ask queries about a step. To make this happen, we will make a small change to the given a30recipeStep pattern by adding a conversational step (user intent) to it. For this:

• Add an intent you should call recipeContinuer to Dialogflow that is able to recognize phrases such as move on to next step, continue, simply next, or other similar phrases that the user might use to indicate a step has been completed.

• After adding this intent to your Dialogflow agent, add the step to the a30recipeStep pattern in the GOAL agent code. Your agent will now wait for the user's response before it continues with the next recipe step.

Enable Capability Check

The agent should be able to respond to user requests for more information about what it can do. To make this happen, add a C3 pattern to the patterns.pl file. In response to a capability check, the agent should indicate what it can do, and for example make clear which recipes it can instruct by mentioning some of them (typically the three you have chosen).

Enable End of Recipe

The initial version of the cooking assistant does not indicate that the final step of a recipe has been reached. It does already have a finalStep/3 predicate that is used as a marker for the final step. Modify the text generated for the finalStep intent in the text.pl file using the built-in string_concat/3 predicate to indicate to the user that this is the last step of the recipe.

Enable Closing of Conversation

The agent should close the conversation with a farewell or a last topic check. To this end, add corresponding C4 patterns in the patterns.pl file. A closing pattern should be selected when all patterns in the agenda have been performed. Make sure that the farewell pattern only is performed when the lastTopicCheck/0 behavioral parameter is not set.

Visual Support

Here, the main focus is to think of how visuals can provide support to decide about a recipe or improve the understanding of a recipe.

Visuals related to Recipes

The aim here is to design the visuals with respect to the recipe name and the instructions. The agent can thereby enrich the information communicated to the user through text and images displayed on the screen.

• For now, your main focus is to display the name and an image related to the chosen three recipes. To do this, you will need patterns in the patterns.pl file.

• Repeat the steps for the recipe instructions as well. For further details, see Week 2.

Example Conversation

The first version of your chatbot should be able to conduct a conversation with the user, which is like the example you can see in Figure below.

Testing Phase 1

Your Cooking Assistant should be able to perform the following:

• Greeting the user

• Terminating the conversation

• Recipe Selection and Instruction Enabled

Week - 1 Deliverable

For your Week-1 submission, you need to submit a weekly progress report in .doc format (See Guidelines).