Dialogflow

When a user has added their preferences and chosen a recipe, they land on the recipe confirmation page. On that page, a user can check the recipe details (see Capability 6: Filter by Number of Ingredients & Recipe Steps) and decide whether they would like to cook that recipe or not. You should now enable the user to also indicate their decision to the conversational agent. To make that happen, your Dialogflow agent should be able to recognize whether the user confirms, or disconfirms the choice of recipe. For this, add the following intents, using the intent names as specified below:

• confirmation: should be matched when a user expresses agreement, or says “yes” one way or another.

• disconfirmation: should be matched when a user expresses disagreement, or simply says “no” in one form or another.

Finally, the agent will close the conversation when a user confirms their choice by saying goodbye. The agent should also allow a user to say farewell. For that, add the following intent:

• farewell: should be matched when a user says goodbye in one form or another.

For all of these intents, make sure you try to cover as many ways a user can express confirmation, disconfirmation, or saying goodbye.

Prolog and Patterns

Confirming choice of recipe

After the user selects a recipe, the agent should allow the user to confirm their choice. We foresee two ways this part of the conversation can proceed:

A: Can you confirm ___* is the recipe you would like to cook?

U: Yes. (Alternatively: No.)

A: Great. (Alternatively: That is unfortunate. [Move back to the recipe selection stage])

* insert name of recipe here

After the agent performs a recipeCheck to ask whether the user can confirm that they would want to cook the recipe shown, a user can do either one of two things: they could provide a confirmation, or a disconfirmation. As appreciation (an intent we added earlier) is very close to confirmation, we also want to take that as a yes (i.e., if a user expresses appreciation in the conversational context of the recipe confirmation pattern a50recipeConfirm, we also want the agent to proceed as if the user has expressed their confirmation). You should add these three different variants of the a50recipeConfirm pattern to the patterns.pl file. One thing to consider here is what would happen when this pattern is completed. After completing, when the user confirms, the conversation should move on to a closing (see below). However, when the user says they do not like the recipe, we do not want that! Instead, we want the conversation to go back to the conversational context of the a50recipeSelect pattern. Think about how you can make that work!

Finally, don’t forget to add agent response to the responses.pl file for the recipeCheck intent!

Saying farewell

Add a pattern that models the following conversational closing pattern. In Moore and Arar’s taxonomy, this is a C4.3: Closing Farewell (Agent) pattern. In its most basic form, it goes like this:

A: goodbye.
U: bye.

Introduce an farewell intent for saying goodbye by adding this intent to your Dialogflow agent and also add this intent to the responses.pl file for generating an agent response. Also add a c43 pattern to the patterns.pl file.

Finally, add a last topic check to your farewell pattern to see if the user wants anything else or wishes to find another recipe. If they indicate they want that, restart the entire conversation. You can do this by using the special action restart. Check out how this action is processed in the dialog_update.mod2g file to better understand what it does. Add [agent, restart] to the pattern when a user confirms they want to restart; this resets the agent's agenda to the initial agenda it started with at the start of conversation.

Visuals

You should create one more page to match the top level intent c43. Add a closing page at the end of the program to bid farewell and thank the user in the html.pl file.

%%% Thank you page at the end.
page(c43, _, Html) :-

Test it Out

Before you start testing, add the c43 to the agent’s agenda in the dialog_init,mod2g file. Why do we not need to add the a50recipeConfirm pattern to the agenda?

Now you should be able to Run your Conversational Agent and talk your way through from an initial greeting to the closing part of a recipe recommendation conversation.