Paths, Choices & Buttons - The Basics

Using Choices Paths and Buttons in Conversations

One of the most important concepts in conversational design is to guide or prompt the user on to the next step of their journey or conversation. Remember, they are interacting with the system to accomplish a task and reach a successful outcome, but they may not know how to get there on their own.

When inviting your end-user to provide a range (wide or limited) of responses, you will find that many of said responses are likely outside the scope of your bot.

To reduce the amount of unexpected input that users send your conversational assistant, the Choice step allows you to focus on the range of responses your user can easily give.

Note: This scenario would operates similarly to the Buttons step.

In addition to providing choice-paths or intents to guide your user through, there are a number of other reasons you will want to leverage choice paths in building your conversations.

• Expect users to be informative- Because users are cooperative, they often offer more information or context than is often required or prompted of them.
• Get the dialog back on track- Your conversation won't always be able to handle cooperative responses. In these cases, rely on pre-built choices or paths for existing parts of your conversation or conversational error handling to get the dialog back on track or the intended conversation direction.
• Move the conversation forward -Every path in your conversation should be intentional, Choices (or Buttons) offers the ability to advance the conversation with pre-defined choices/intents.

Conceptually Imagining Choice Paths

Example: How we might use a Choice path to direct a conversation? Let's say we want to provide the user with options to go left or right:

To create a path for 'right' we would create an intent called "go_right" and provide some sample utterances for what the user might say to signify their intention is to go right.

Some sample utterances for our "go_right" intent could be:

• "go right"
• "I want to go right"
• "right"
• "please go right"

Now, if the user says any of the sample utterances within the go_right intent, that intent will be triggered and the conversation will follow whatever path has the go_right intent linked.