How to respond to “help” on Google Assistant?

Question

I got the following feedback from Google team:

When a user says "help" to your agent, it does not actually provide any guidance for what a user can say or ask for, it just says "sure, assistants are here to help"

My webhook is implemented in Spring Boot. Any idea how my web service can respond to help requests?

Answer 1

Since you're using API.AI, that sounds like it might be one of the default responses that are built-in to the Small Talk Domain. You'll probably want to do two things:

1. Turn off the Small Talk Domain by clicking on the Domains menu on the left and then turning the switch on the Small Talk domain (it should be the first one) off.

2. Make your own Intent to handle the "help" command (and possibly a few other related statements) by setting these in the User Says section of the Intent. You can have this intent fulfilled by sending it to your webhook by checking the Use Webhook box in the Fulfillment section, but for simple text responses this probably isn't necessary. Just have the Intent return a short help message describing what can be done by adding text to the Response area.

Some suggestions and things to consider when writing your help intent or intents:

• Make the response relatively short. This is text that, when read, can't be interrupted.

• Consider context-sensitive help by using Input Contexts to determine the state of the conversation at that moment. A user asking for help after a particular prompt should get information that helps them at that prompt.

• Allow for multiple ways to ask for help in the User Says section. Phrases like "I'm confused" may also be good to trigger help.

• Allow for asking for help on specific topics by using multiple intents that provide different answers. These may be tied to the Contexts as well.