article by Purnadip Chakrabarti & Pulkit Gopalani, July 2022
Digital assistants are developed for the purpose of assisting users in specific areas related to their business or personal life. Therefore, a digital assistant will not be able to please everyone and most likely it is not even designed to please everyone.
However, that doesn't mean your digital assistant has to say "sorry, I don't understand" for requests that aren't in the scope of what it was designed for. Instead, a digital assistant can reach out to a source that knows: the Internet.
This article explains how Google search can be integrated with Oracle Digital Assistant to provide answers to questions that are outside the scope for which the digital assistant was designed. The image below shows a conversation captured from the conversation tester embedded in Oracle Digital Assistant.
To see more, watch the video below.
In summary, the solution described in this article shows how to set up your digital assistant to answer out-of-domain questions. At the same time, right after answering the out-of-domain question, the digital assistant can remind the user what it, the digital assistant, was designed for and how it can assist the user.
Get the full article here (PDF)
Download the Sample Skill (zip)
To use this skill, obtain the API key as detailed in the article. Then, on opening the skill, go to Settings. In the "Configuration" tab, create a New Parameter with name "serpAPIKey" and type "Secure" and add your API key in the parameter value. If this parameter already exists, just add in the key by using "Edit".
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