Bots - Introduction

Overview

ConvoKraft bots are the conversational assistants you build to serve as the conversational interface of your Catalyst application. Technically, bots are instances you create in the ConvoKraft service, intact with their Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and conversational abilities.

You can create a bot for your Catalyst application from the Catalyst console. You will need to configure the set of tasks to be performed by your bot as actions. A ConvoKraft bot can be configured to perform actions while conversing with the user. The responses of each action can be based on your application’s specific needs. Each action can be configured to respond either with a direct answer or execute a business logic in your application. You can choose to develop the business logic of your ConvoKraft bots using any one of the following platforms:

• Catalyst Integration Functions: Catalyst Serverless Integration Functions are custom-built coding structures, which is hosted in Catalyst servers. Refer here to learn more about Catalyst Integration functions.

• Deluge: Deluge is Zoho’s native online scripting language, which is hosted in Zoho’s cloud environment. Refer here to learn more about Deluge.

• Webhooks: Webhooks are call-back functions that can be used to access your custom server endpoints when specific actions are invoked by the bot. You can also choose to secure your Webhook URLs, if required.

You can create multiple ConvoKraft bots for your application, as per your requirements. After configuring the required actions for the ConvoKraft bot, it will be able to respond to conversations using its native conversational abilities, and perform required tasks based on its understanding of the configured actions.

Abilities of a ConvoKraft bot

A Catalyst ConvoKraft bot has the following in-built abilities by default :

• Intent parsing — Understanding the intention of a sentence to perform the required action.
• Context maintenance — Understanding the relation between a sentence and its previous or next sentence.
• Entity extraction — Extracting information as programmable data from a conversational sentence.

These native abilities complement the custom abilities or actions in every bot built using the ConvoKraft service.

Workflow of a ConvoKraft bot

After you create a Convokraft bot, you will need to configure the required actions for it based on the different usecases of your application. Then the bot can respond to all user messages related to that particular action. When an input message is received, ConvoKraft will compare the input message with the sample invocations of the configured actions of the bot.

If the message doesn’t seem to match with any of the configured actions, the bot will respond that it cannot understand the message. If ConvoKraft was able to match the input message with a pre-configured action of the bot, it will prompt for user data required to fulfil that action as an input, in a conversational way. For example, if you are trying to book an event, the bot may prompt questions to get the details, such as the name of the event, start time, end time, and location. After all the required data is fetched as input, ConvoKraft will execute the business logic defined for that action or respond with an direct answer, depending on the response configured for that action.