Using Topics to Organize Conversational Flows

How to organize multiple conversational flows? How to organize a messy canvas? How to use topics to organize my assistant?

As you build an increasingly complex assistant on Voiceflow, you may find it more difficult to navigate your canvas from all the overlapping path connections and the number of blocks. 

Topics are a great way to arrange different conversational flows within the same domain. 

You can think of topics as subsections of the same conversational theme. They can each correspond to a specific user intent or series of related steps. They also help break down a busy canvas and make it easy for you and your team members to collaborate on complex assistants. 

As an example, let's create a personal assistant that can tell you about the weather or calculate how much time is needed to drive to your office. 

1). Topic starts with an intent

You can use an intent step to jump from one topic to another within the same conversation. When the chat assistant is instructed to "listen for an intent" and doesn't find any matching intents within the same topic, it will look through other topics to find a matching intent. 

2). Topic starts with a block from a go-to action

Instead of starting a topic with an intent step, you can also start with a block. To jump to a block in a different topic, you will have to use an action after a step. You can add an action that is carried out after a step so that the assistant will go to another topic. 

You can also create subtopics within your topic to break up a large flow into smaller, digestible conversations for improved readability and logic flexibility. 

Below is a longer YouTube tutorial demonstrating the full power of topics for organizing an assistant!