IBM Watson Assistant: How do I have the chatbot repeat a response until it recognizes what the user is saying?

Question

I am building a chatbot that needs to be able to have long, branching conversations with users. Its purpose is to be able to engage the user for longs periods of time. One of the problems that I'm running into is how to handle unrelated responses from a user in the middle of a dialogue tree without "resetting" the entire conversation.

For example, let's say they have the following conversation:

Chatbot: Do you like vanilla or chocolate ice cream?

User: Vanilla

Chatbot: (recognizes "vanilla" and responds with appropriate child node) Great! Would you like chocolate or caramel on top?

User: Caramel

Chatbot: (recognizes "caramel" and responds with appropriate child node) That sounds delicious! Do you prefer sprinkles or whipped cream?

User: I would like a cherry!

At that point, my problem is that the chatbot triggers the "anything_else" response and says something like "I didn't understand that." Which means if the user wants to continue the conversation about ice cream, he has to start from the very beginning.

I'm very new to using IBM Watson assistant, but I did as much research as I could and I wasn't able to find anything. Any advice or help would be appreciated! So far the only idea I had was to have an "anything_else" option for every single dialogue node that could jump back to the next node up. But that sounds extremely complicated and time consuming. I was wondering if there was an easier way to just have the chatbot repeat whatever question it is asking until it gets a response that triggers one of the child nodes.

EDIT: It may be helpful to add that what I'm trying to here is "funnel" the user down certain conversation paths.

Answer 1

In anything_else node, you can enable return after digressions which will go back to the previous node and it fulfils your requirement.

Answer 2

There is a Anything Else option that acts as a fallback when the chatbot fails to recognize the intent.

You can take a look at the documentation here .