watsonx Assistant

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  • 1.  Do you use Multiple Conditioned Responses?

    Posted Wed September 14, 2022 01:57 AM
    Hi all,

    I was curious as to what the experience of others has been in regard to the use of multiple conditioned responses (I'm going to shorten this to MCR for this post).

    Personally, I tend to avoid them as I find them too cumbersome to debug and quite honestly, I'm not convinced that they provide much benefit.  Perhaps they aren't too bad for two or three responses, but when you have many responses I find you loose the ability to quickly pinpoint the response that is giving an error when trying to debug a MCR.  If I instead use a branched dialog tree to evaluate the various conditional responses, I can always know what node if giving me an issue and jump to it from the "Try it out" area.  If I try this same thing with MCR I am taken to the main node and then have to manually try to figure out which response is causing the problem.

    The other issue that I have with MCR's is that the display in the node is quite frustrating.  Firstly, the fact that a node has a whole bunch of conditional responses embedded in it isn't terribly obvious when you are traversing your dialog tree. Secondly, you really only get a small amount of information on the main node screen when you click on a MCR node to view the conditional responses and then you have to go into the settings to see more detail (like what the response does in the "Then assistant should" section.  I just find it much clearer to see a branched dialog tree and be able to quickly scroll down the nodes to see what is being evaluated and the full detail on what is happening is only a quick, single click away.

    Perhaps MCR's might be needed if your dialog tree gets too big and starts hitting the limits of the system for the number of nodes, but outside that I'm probably going to stick with my conditional branch structures for now.

    How about you?  I'd love to hear other opinions on the use of MCR's and if you find them useful.

    Cheers,
    Graham

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    Graham Walker
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    #WatsonAssistant


  • 2.  RE: Do you use Multiple Conditioned Responses?

    IBM Champion
    Posted Fri September 16, 2022 12:59 PM
    You have a good point Graham;

    Althogh MCR is very useful when you have different outputs for different integrations, for example. You may have an audio device, or a simple text output, or a rich content display, or even limited apps to deliver an aswer. In this case is much easier to handle a bunch of different aswers (format wise) in just one node than having to build a node-tree for each intent to handle this.
    This is just one situation that MCRs are usefull, sometimes is just because of the state of a single context var, like when you need to answer differently in the morning, in the aftrnoon, in the evening and also taking care of timezones of the audience.

    Each approach has its value, and for sure there is no wrong or right in this choice ;-)



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    Marcos Lohmann
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  • 3.  RE: Do you use Multiple Conditioned Responses?

    Posted Mon September 19, 2022 01:48 AM
    Hi Marcos,

    Thanks for the feedback.  Those are some good points about MCRs.  I forgot about the time-based replies for instance and you are quite right that using a MCR for those is more efficient than using a dialog node branch.  I guess it is a bit like the decisions that you make as to whether to create an Intent or an Entity to handle specific user input.  All of one or the other approach often doesn't work and it is a blend of the approaches that functions best.

    For the different delivery channels, I can see the use of MCRs too, although depending on your overall conversation design, this one could go either way with MCRs or Dialog branches (eg. if you detect the channel at the top of the tree and have a folder/node structure to address all content for that channel - although you may then use a MCR to jump to the correct folder :-) )

    I'm always interested in finding out how other people are using Watson.  I really like the service and I wish there was a more active forum where users could exchange ideas.  Sometimes it is about finding out how to do something or troubleshoot, but it can also be very valuable to discuss approaches to achieving results in a broader sense.

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    Graham Walker
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