article by Frank Nimphius, December 2018
It happens in a chatbot interaction that a user scrolls the conversation history displayed in the messenger client and selects a list or button action that is no longer in scope for the current conversation. For example, in a travel booking chatbot, a user may have selected a destination and provided the name to be printed on the tickets When asked to select a free gift voucher, she then scrolls the message history and selects a different destination.
Changing a travel destination should not be a problem, you may think, and for most of the time you are right. But changing the travel destination may have an impact to other parts of a conversation. For example, a selected destination may not qualify for a voucher, or in the process of booking the travel, the user selected a local agency for an airport pick-up.
Chatbots don't control the messenger and therefore cannot prevent users from selecting out-of-scope actions. So the best thing it can do is to find a solution that doesn't upset the user and also does not mess with the business task at hand.
In Oracle Digital Assistant, out-of-scope actions are referred to as an out-of-order messages. While there is a default implementation for how a skill bot handles out-of-order messages, there also is an option for bot designers to customize the behavior, either for the bot as a whole or just for the current state in a conversation.
In this article I explain how out-of-order messages are handed in Oracle Digital Assistant and how you can customize the behavior.
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