watsonx Assistant

Hi,
I've been playing around with Actions and, while I can see some particular use cases where they would be useful, I am not sure if they provide all the functionality of Intents/Entities and Dialog.
When I create conversation flows I spend some time looking at all my questions, separating them into groups of similar nature that will be built as an Intent and then I look at the various groups/potential Intents to see if any make sense to combine and use Entities to provide specific answers without having to use separate intents.
For instance, one of the simplest examples is the question "What time does your store open?" vs "What time does your Sydney store open?". 
How do I create this in Actions to evaluate that this is an "Opening Hours" Intent with the specific Entity mention of "Sydney" so that I can provide the Sydney store response vs the Melbourne store response vs a general opening hours answer?
Regards,
Graham

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Graham Walker
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#WatsonAssistant

Are people actively using Actions? 

I have to honestly say that I am not finding them terribly useful.  Probably the greatest use that I see myself using them for will be to leverage the ability for difference actions (or even steps in actions) to call different API's (vs using Webhooks in Dialog where you only get the one Webhook).

I also find the linear nature of the steps to be non-intuitive.  I much prefer dialog with branches as it is much clearer to me what the logic flow will be.

Anyone else using Actions and Dialog? Any other experiences?

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Graham Walker
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Original Message:
Sent: Tue August 09, 2022 01:31 AM
From: Graham Walker
Subject: Actions vs Intent/Entities

Hi,
I've been playing around with Actions and, while I can see some particular use cases where they would be useful, I am not sure if they provide all the functionality of Intents/Entities and Dialog.
When I create conversation flows I spend some time looking at all my questions, separating them into groups of similar nature that will be built as an Intent and then I look at the various groups/potential Intents to see if any make sense to combine and use Entities to provide specific answers without having to use separate intents.
For instance, one of the simplest examples is the question "What time does your store open?" vs "What time does your Sydney store open?". 
How do I create this in Actions to evaluate that this is an "Opening Hours" Intent with the specific Entity mention of "Sydney" so that I can provide the Sydney store response vs the Melbourne store response vs a general opening hours answer?
Regards,
Graham

------------------------------
Graham Walker
------------------------------

#WatsonAssistant

I am trying to evolve into actions too.
There are some gaps between Dialog and Actions that really NEED to be fulfilled:

1) context variables from Dialog may transit to Actions and vice versa, is ok to preset session vars too, but their scope should be valid for both
2) entities should be managed in one place only and be accessible in both, not as "entities" for Dialog and "Saved Answers" for Actions
3) webhooks should be implemented for actions, even if you have only one webhook endpoint, it works well as a hub for switching between several APIs, it is usefull when you need to present a different set of options for each user profile; Actions do not permit such condition

There may be a few other enhencements to address as well, but these are critical for most applications!

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Marcos Lohmann
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Original Message:
Sent: Wed September 14, 2022 02:01 AM
From: Graham Walker
Subject: Actions vs Intent/Entities

Are people actively using Actions? 

I have to honestly say that I am not finding them terribly useful.  Probably the greatest use that I see myself using them for will be to leverage the ability for difference actions (or even steps in actions) to call different API's (vs using Webhooks in Dialog where you only get the one Webhook).

I also find the linear nature of the steps to be non-intuitive.  I much prefer dialog with branches as it is much clearer to me what the logic flow will be.

Anyone else using Actions and Dialog? Any other experiences?

------------------------------
Graham Walker

Original Message:
Sent: Tue August 09, 2022 01:31 AM
From: Graham Walker
Subject: Actions vs Intent/Entities

Hi,
I've been playing around with Actions and, while I can see some particular use cases where they would be useful, I am not sure if they provide all the functionality of Intents/Entities and Dialog.
When I create conversation flows I spend some time looking at all my questions, separating them into groups of similar nature that will be built as an Intent and then I look at the various groups/potential Intents to see if any make sense to combine and use Entities to provide specific answers without having to use separate intents.
For instance, one of the simplest examples is the question "What time does your store open?" vs "What time does your Sydney store open?". 
How do I create this in Actions to evaluate that this is an "Opening Hours" Intent with the specific Entity mention of "Sydney" so that I can provide the Sydney store response vs the Melbourne store response vs a general opening hours answer?
Regards,
Graham

------------------------------
Graham Walker
------------------------------

#WatsonAssistant