Can I extract an entity from the initial trigger phrase. For e.g. I want a topic "download a brochure for X" where X will be an Entity.
Thus if I set up an Entity for brochure subjects the "download a brochure" topic will go straight into a condition branch where the variable will be the Entity that has been extracted and immediately deliver up a link to a relevant brochure on the requested subject.
Yes, this is something we plan to add in an upcoming release.
I'm also looking for this capability and am surprised it's not available OOTB. I'm working with a custom skill I've built and was hoping to pass the entity on to the skill for deciphering rather than having to define each entity in PVA. Disappointing, but hopefully this will be added in the future...
I can confirm that Entity extraction from within the trigger phrase works. IF I explicitly put all the Entities in the trigger phrases, it does indeed skip the question clarifying the Entity and go straight to the relevant branch of the condition. So, from a chat user perspective it avoids the question repetition which is great. However, on the Bot authoring side it seems that I need to repeat the generic "do you have a brochure" concatenated with the Entity for each member of the Entity list i.e. "do you have a brochure for X" "do you have a brochure for Y" and "do you have a leaflet on X" and "do you have a leaflet on Y". Obviously the size of the list of trigger phrases quickly escalates. What I was hoping to do was to define the trigger phrase in the form of Generic question + Entity (inc synonyms) i.e. "do you have a brochure for [Entity]. That way all I need to do is to maintain a list of the generic questions and the list of members of the Entity. Such that I can articulate the trigger phrases in the form "do you have a [Entity - types of download, synonym brochure, leaflet, flyer] on [Entity sports - baseball synonym softball; scuba gear synonym sub acqua gear]" (sorry it is not easy to show it in a flat form). Is it possible to reference Entity's as part of the trigger question in this way ? or is there some other way to avoid having to expressly articulate every combination of download type + sport in the trigger phrases?
Yes, this is possible. You just need to make sure that your give enough utterances in the trigger phrase such that the topic is triggered. Our patented AI is smart enough to skip questions if the entity you are looking for is already part of the trigger phrase.
-Pawan
Just to clarify - what I mean by goes straight into a condition branch, that condition branch is preceded by a question but the question is skipped if the variable is already populated by the extracted Entity. The issue is that I don't seem to be able to extract an Entity from the trigger phrase.