Terminologies

To understand how pathways work, let’s first understand the terminologies.

​Nodes

These blocks you see here are called Nodes.

​Pathways

Each of these dotted lines is called a Pathway. Their start end end points are the Purple Circles on the top and bottom of the nodes.

In order to create a pathway from a node, you would click on the purple circle at the bottom of the node and drag your mouse to connect to the top purple circle another node.

Upon doing so, you will now have a new dotted line connecting the two nodes, with a ‘New Pathway’ button in the middle of the line.

In order to instruct the agent when to take this pathway, you would click on the Edit icon on the ‘New Pathway’ button, and input the conditions for when the agent should take this pathway. In the above example, the agent would take this pathway if the user is not available to talk, so I labelled the pathway as ‘not a good time to talk’.

And there you have it! You have now created a pathway from one node to another, and instructed the agent when to take this pathway. You can connect as many nodes as you want in this manner, and create as many pathways as you want. In order to create a new Node, press the ‘Add new Node’ button at the top-left of the screen.

​How the Pathways Agent Works

The agent starts at the first node, and then moves to the next node based on the pathway that the agent decides to take. The agent will then execute the instructions in the node as dialogue, and then move on to the next node based on the pathway that the agent decides to take. This process will continue until the agent decides to end the call.

The agent will make decisions based on the labels you put in the pathways, when connecting one node to another, and the dialogue generated will be based on the instructions you set in the nodes.

For Example,

In this example, at the node named ‘Ask for reservation info’, the node asks for the user’s reservation information. Based on the user’s response, the agent will then move on to the next node based on the labels you put in the pathways. For the current node, it will check if the user has provided reservation information where the number of guests is either less than 8 or more than 8. If the user has provided reservation information where the number of guests is less than 8, the agent will move on to the node named ‘Reservation booking’. If the user has provided reservation information where the number of guests is more than 8, the agent will move on to the node named ‘Transfer Call’. The agent will then execute the instructions in the node as dialogue, and then move on to the next node based on the pathway that the agent decides to take. And the process repeats!

​Conditions

Conditions are a way to provide the agent with a condition that must be met in order for the agent to move on to the next node. If the condition is not met, the agent will stay on the same node and ensure the condition is met until the condition is fulfilled.

Using the same example above, I set the condition for the ‘Ask for reservation info’ node as follows - “You must get the date, time, and number of guests for this reservation”. This means that the agent will stay on the ‘Ask for reservation info’ node until the user provides the date, time, and number of guests for the reservation. If the user says something else or deviates from the conversation, the agent will stay on the ‘Ask for reservation info’ node and prompt the user to provide the date, time, and number of guests for the reservation.

This helps you to ensure that the user provides the necessary information before moving on to the next node, and helps you to control the flow of the conversation.

​Global Nodes

Global Nodes take precendence over the condition decisions made by the agent. You can treat a global node as a node, that every other node in the pathway has a pathway to, with the label as the ‘Global Pathway Label’.

Using the Reservation Booking Example, if the user were to ask a question like ‘What are the opening hours of the restaurant’ when the agent is at the ‘Ask for reservation info’ node, the condition decision would not be met as the user did not provide the date, time, and number of guests for the reservation. However, the pathway label would be ‘user has a question about the restaurant’s hours or location’, which links to a Global Node. As Global Nodes take precedence over the condition decision, the agent would then move to the ‘Global Node’ named ‘Restaurant Questions’ and provide the user with the opening hours of the restaurant. After providing the user with the opening hours of the restaurant, the agent would then automatically return to the ‘Ask for reservation info’ node, and continue with the flow of the conversation.

This helps you to handle edge cases where the user might ask a question that is not related to the current conversation, and allows you to provide the user with the information they need, before returning to the conversation.

Tip: The variables {{lastUserMessage}} and {{prevNodePrompt}} can be used in the Global Node to provide the agent with context on what the user said, and steering the conversation back to its own original goal.