Design human like experience: introducing Story Block

User: Hi, I want to travel from Madrid to London. What is the cheapest flight available?

Chatbot: Where do you want to go?

User: …. 🤬

Well, if you’re familiar with chatbots, you must have experienced this scenario. Unless you have a huge tech team that can build the whole chatbot from scratch, coding every possible outcome and combination — you were out of luck. Well, not anymore.

One of the most common conversation patterns is to collect a few pieces of information from a user in order to do something (like book a restaurant, call an API, search a database, etc.). To make sure user is not irritated, we should not ask for already provided information. So how can this be done? Your choices are:

• Hire a tech team. Spend thousands of dollars to build something 😰.
• Use RASA slot filling (well, hire a tech team, let them code it in RASA 👀 )
• Use Alice for free (or for a small subscription fee) and build it just by dragging & dropping 😮.

Introducing Story Block

All you have to do is to create a story block in Alice.

Step 1: Sign up in Alice. https://app.getalice.ai/register.

Step 2: Create a channel (you can connect to website, app, messenger, facebook, WhatsApp, Viber …)

Step 3: Connect with your NLP backend (preferably wit.ai directly from Alice)

Step 4: Create a Story Block.

What is a story block?

Suppose, you are run a travel agency. People come to you to search flights. What are the things you need to know to search a flight?

• (Mandatory) Arrival City, Departure City, Departure Date.
• (Optional) Is it a return flight? Return date, Number of people, Preferred flight, Preferred time etc.

Now you can connect to your NLP backend (where the relevant entities are trained) and design the whole conversation flow by dragging and dropping.

Or book a demo, https://calendly.com/shuvo-rahman/.

First, you create a story block. Then for every variable (entities) you need, you add new story element. Once you add these, your chatbot will check what are the entities it received from the customer, and take the rest of the mandatory variables.

Moreover, you can create a lot of advanced customisation. You can mention,

• what the chatbot will ask to collect any information.
• what the chatbot will do if the user input doesn’t match the expected format.
• where it will save the user input
• if you want to connect to any backend validation system
• if the variable is mandatory or not
• how many times it will ask questions if the input is wrong before it passes the user to customer support (we always prioritise smooth user experience). No more “I don’t understand”.

For more details, visit https://docs.getalice.ai/getting-started/bot-builder/add-blocks-in-your-sequence#story-block

Well, finally make your customers happy again. For more info, you can reach me at shuvo.rahman@getalice.ai