Bots are the conversational assistants you build, to serve as the conversational interface of your application. Technically, bots are your own instances of Zia, intact with its natural language understanding and conversational abilities.
You can create multiple bots as per your requirements. Every bot should be configured with desired abilities, as required. It would then be able to respond to conversations based on its understanding of those abilities, by incorporating the learning from the native conversational abilities of Zia.
Abilities of a Zia bot
Since all bots are built on top of Zia, every bot has these abilities by default.
- Intent parsing — understanding the intention of a sentence to perform the apt action
- Context maintenance — understanding the relation between a sentence and its previous or next sentence
- Entity extraction — extracting information as programmable data from a conversational sentence
- Chit chatting — responding to trivial conversations like greeting, thanking etc.
These native abilities complement the custom abilities that are individually built for over every bot instance.
Workflow of a Zia bot
Once a bot is configured with the required abilities, it would be able to respond to invocations of these abilities. When an input message is received, Zia would compare the input message with the sample invocations of the preconfigured abilities of the bot.
If the message doesn't seem to match with any of the configured abilities, the bot would respond that it couldn't understand the message. If Zia was able to match the input message with a preconfigured ability of the bot, it would prompt for the data that are preconfigured as required to fulfill that ability, as an input, in a conversational way. Once all the required data are got as input, Zia would execute the business logic defined for the ability.
Hence, configuring an ability of a Zia bot means defining the sample invocations, required input data and the business logic of the ability.