How to Use Follow-Up Intents in Dialogflow for Chatbot Conversations
In chatbot conversations, there are times when you need to refer back to previous messages and continue the flow. This is where follow-up intents come in handy. Dialogflow allows you to create secondary intents called follow-up intents, which are used to continue the conversation and ask for more information or repeat an event.
To create a follow-up intent, you simply make it a child of its associated parent intent. This means that follow-up intents refer back to the previous intents to keep the chatbot conversation going. When you create a follow-up intent, an output context is automatically added to the parent intent, and an input context of the same name is added to the follow-up intent.
Follow-up intents are only triggered when the parent intent has been matched in the previous conversation turn. There are default follow-up intents like “yes” or “no,” but you can also create custom-defined follow-up intents for more specific scenarios.
Nested follow-up intents allow you to further follow up on the user’s interest by creating intents within the follow-up intents. For example, in an insurance chatbot, you can have a default welcome intent with options for different insurance policies. When a user clicks on a specific policy, the chatbot can show more information about that policy using nested follow-up intents.
Here’s how you can create follow-up intents in Dialogflow:
1. In the parent intent, provide options or buttons for the user to choose from.
2. When the user clicks on an option, create a follow-up intent for that specific choice.
3. Name the follow-up intent and provide bot responses for that intent.
4. If needed, create nested follow-up intents within the follow-up intent to continue the flow based on the user’s choices.
5. Provide training phrases and bot responses for the nested follow-up intents.
By using follow-up intents and nested follow-up intents, you can easily create a dynamic chatbot flow that engages users and keeps the conversation going. This feature allows you to design more interactive and personalized chatbot experiences.