Watson Assistant: I am not a Parrot!
Current Behavior
Users sometimes try to trick a virtual assistant and ask the same question over and over again to check if the assistant is aware of the topics being asked.
The problem sometimes isn’t with the end-user though, training issues or confusion between two intents can cause your virtual assistant to repeat the same response again.
You can provide multiple responses in a dialog node for all intents, but the difficulty increases when you are describing a business process or you are just stating simple information like the location of your store and there isn’t much space for creative responses to a user question.
Behavior Correction
An approach to solve this behavior is to simply record all the intents/topics that a specific user asked at every interaction.
Start by creating an empty array in the start of your dialog.
Then add a node under your Welcome node to always record the intents being asked by the user.
Now that you have recorded all the intents in an array and the virtual assistant is aware of all the topics, you can check if this is a repeated topic at every interaction.
Now it depends on how you want your virtual assistant to behave in such a situation, you can either acknowledge that this is a second time and provide the same response, you can ask the user to check previous responses in the chat or even ask the user to rephrase his/her question.
In this approach, the virtual assistant is acknowledging the fact that it might be a repeated question and asking the user to rephrase the question in case it is a training issue.
In the same node, the intent is removed from the “intents_asked” array to allow the user to repeat the question and get a response afterwards if s/he insists.
You can download this sample from here.
There many approaches to mimic this behavior this is just one of them. It all goes back to how you want your virtual assistant to interact with your end-users.
