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I'm wanting to have a topic that functions similar to the built in "Fallback" topic. I want the chatbot to detect anytime a user enters any set of numbers and store that in a variable "num" to pass into a flow. It's an inventory function. I created a fallback topic when I originally published my bot and by far the most popular topic has been inventory lookup but in my "unrecognized phrases" spreadsheet I can see that many users are attempting to just enter the item number from the start instead of triggering the inventory lookup topic and then entering the number when prompted. User education has been attempted many times to correct this but it is still happening a lot. I know if I can just create a topic in the chatbot that looks for numbers being entered and passes those numbers to the inventory lookup flow this will solve 70% or more of the failed chatbot interactions. So, in closing, is this even possible and if so, where do I access the parameters to achieve it?
You should handle this using entities and slot filling:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-virtual-agents/advanced-entities-slot-filling#prebuilt-entities
You can use one of prebuilts for numbers, or if the inventory number is a mixer of numbers lets and symbols you would use a regex entity to look for the number and fill the slot in the relevant topic.
For instance
Do you have item ab-2422 in stock at store #31
would be
Do you have item REGEX_ENTITY_STOCKNUMBER in stock at STORE_LOCATION_NUMBER
And with those variables set you can then run your flow.
Thanks for the direction. This really helped
I created the entity and it works perfectly inside the topic but not as the topic trigger. I typed the name of the entity in the trigger phrase and REGEX_ENTITY_PART_NUM as a trigger phrase. I'm still having to go to the topic via the traditional question and then it uses the entity as the question answer. Am I missing something to unlock it as a topic trigger also?
Do you have a question node that can fill the slot as the first step in the topic? If it exists in the question, it should skip the question node prompt, even though you need to do it in the dialog authoring.
Here's what I've got:
You will probably need more of an utterance to trigger the slot filling. Perhaps try a welcome dialog that asks the question as well? Utterances are intended to be more conversational than your example, and you do not need to provide the entity name, just examples of that entity in well-sourced utterances.
Ie Im looking up part number 284934
39349
I'm trying to locate part 34343 etc
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