Problem with dialog nodes and intents in Watson Assistent

Question

I'm using IBM Watson Assistant for creating a chatbot. I'm using the web interface with the intents, entities and dialog flow|tree (I don't know how it is called, I'm just calling it web interface). I have four problems and hope that someone can help with it.

1. I have created two intens: #how_are_you with an example "How are you?" and intent #feeling_good with example "I'm good". Of course I have much more examples for these two intents. In the dialog I have now a parent node looking for #feeling_good and a child node looking for #how_are_you (skipping user input in-between). When a user now inputs the sentence "I'm good. How are you?" then only #feeling_good is triggered but not #how_are_you. How can I trigger both intents with only one user input?

2. I would like to have one node in the dialog which waits for say 100s and then sends another message to the user. Waiting is no problem (using pause) but how can I do it that only a message is sent after the 100s if the user did not send another message during the waiting period? That means when the user sends a message the waiting node should be canceled.

3. I have a node which checks for a certain intent. When the intent does not match I'm jumping back to the parent node. The problem is that the text from the parent node is repeated each time. How can I prevent this repetition when jumping back?

4. The last question is perhaps a bit more tricky. I would like to define an array of the numbers [1,2,3,4,5]. Then one node should sample a random number without replacement from that array (eg 2), ie the remaining array is then [1,3,4,5]. After some time another node should pick another number at random from the array (say 4). And so on. How can this be implemented? I know about variables (eg $var) but I don't know how to represent arrays and sample random numbers.

Thank you so much for your answers in advance. And happy new year to everybody.

Answer 1

1) In Watson Assistant always the intent with the highest confidence is used first. Hence processing multiple intents triggered by one sentence is tricky. The "best" solution is to use composite intent - #HELLO_HOW_ARE_YOU. Alternatively you can create conditions that would check if the first two intents returned are a comination of #HELLO and #HOW_ARE_YOU

2) Waiting and sending messages due to inactivity should be ideally handled by the client implementing the chat console in your interface. WA is not well suited for these types of operations, while there is some support, better way how to handle these is get your client application - when inactivity detected - to send something that will be mapped to #INACTIVITY_INTENT and WA will respond with your message coupled with that intent.

3) Don't jump to the node but jump to the first child of that node and use wait for user input .

4) This is possible. WA expression language supports getting random number, getting the size of an array and removing elements from the array. Eg <? $array.remove(new Random().nextInt(3))?> <? $array.remove(new Random().nextInt(3))?>