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Bot-v2: AI Bot that Combines Flow Diagram, FAQs, Document Search and More

 

Example showing how bots-v2 may start by looking up a flow diagram (bottom row), and if there is no match look up FAQs (middle row) or documents (top row).

 

Bot-v2 is the latest type of chatbot. It combines the capabilities of all other types of bots and is defined using an intuitive and simple design interface.

With bots-v2, you can achieve maximum responsiveness and user satisfaction and minimize user drop-out.

The key idea in bots-v2 is that the bot execution engine looks for an appropriate response to a user message across an ordered (by priority) list of information sources, until it finds a source that contains a response. The key information sources are:

  1. A flow diagram which acts as a decision tree, and given the state of the conversation and the user input determines the next action.

  2. A list questions and answers (FAQs): the user’s utterance is matched against the questions to see if any of them has the same or similar semantics.

  3. A collection of documents: these documents may be Web pages or other specialized collections such as Salesforce documentation. This is only available for Enterprise plans. More details on how to set a collection can be found at the document-based Question-Answering page.

  4. Prompt the user to leave a message if none of the previous sources have an appropriate response.

  5. Use a chit-chat-based response: chit-chat responses do not generally provide useful information to users but can help to keep them from dropping out. See how to customize chit-chat responses.

Creating a Bot-V2

To create a new bot-v2, go to the CHATBOTS page, click “New bot” and select “Bot V2.” This will take you to the main bot-v2 page as shown below, where you can select which information sources to activate and customize them.

Generally, in most cases one would start with a flow diagram and then add more sources to improve responsiveness.

From this page, you can select your chatbot’s capabilities.

Bot Flow Diagram

This option enables flow bot functionality. Clicking “Edit Flow Diagram” will take you to the flow bot builder, where you can design the conversational flow of your chatbot. For more information, see Flow Diagram Bots.

During a chat, if flow bot functionality is enabled and a user message does not satisfy any of the current link conditions to continue the chat, the chatbot will use the following options on this page, if enabled, to respond to the user. The precedence of these options is in the order given.

Questions & Answers List

This option enables FAQ match functionality. Clicking “Edit Questions & Answers” will take you to the FAQs editor, where you can specify questions for your bot to recognize and answers to those questions.

In rare cases, you may want to build an FAQs-only bot, without any supporting flow diagram. In this case, you can specify an intro message for the bot. But usually the FAQs act as a “backup” to a flow diagram. This is equivalent to specifying an FAQ bot as catch-all to a traditional flow diagram bot (see Catch-All).

If the bot is unable to accurately match the user utterance to any of the provided FAQs, enabling the “Show top matching questions when there is no exact match” option will present a list of similar questions that may answer the user’s question.

Document-Based Question Answering

Enabling this option allows the bot to use a question answering AI model trained on your Web documents to answer questions that do not match the specified bot flow or questions on the questions & answers list (if enabled). Clicking “Edit Documents Collection” allows you to specify URLs for your documents. For more information, see Question Answering.

This section also has options to include a link to the document that contains the answer to the user’s question and to show potential matches if no answer could be extracted.

Offer to Leave Message

If none of the above options can provide a response to user input, this option will prompt the user to leave a message. The “Default Asking Message” field specifies the message that will be sent to the user if they choose to leave a message. You can specify either a specific agent or an agent role (i.e. every agent with that role) to be notified when a user leaves a message.

Chit-Chat

This option uses a scripted set of responses to attempt to continue the conversation with the user. For more information, see Catch-All.