Possible use of dialog to handle responses

[jt-nti]

Just a slightly more detailed response to https://twitter.com/bobbyshaw/status/778280943635329024

There are a few options for integrating Conversation with external services, for example indicating a request to a service is required in the output and feeding the results back in via the context. That seems overly complex for the rugby bot though so if you did want to use the dialog facility in the Conversation service, I think I'd probably do something like this (using fixture as an example)...

• Add a dialog node with a #next_fixture intent condition
• Instead of a simple text output, use the advanced output editor for something like this...

{
  "output": {
    "text": "%s play %s on %s %s.",
    "request": "fixture"
  }
}

• Detect that a fixture request is required and handle the external service the same way as now, and formatting the output text with the result of the external service

Results might need a slight tweak to handle the case when the game hasn't been played. Perhaps something like...

{
  "output": {
    "text": {
      "available": "The score between %s and %s was %d-%d.",
      "unavailable": "We haven't played that game yet"
    },
    "request": "result"
  }
}

Anyway, there's obviously no reason to use dialog but I think the above should work for any future bots where there's a simple interaction.

[bobbyshaw]

Oh, I understand now. It didn't click beforehand about writing custom entries in the JSON and consuming this instead via API.

Thanks for the write-up!

[jt-nti]

No problem. Nice bot, thanks for sharing it.