Tutorial 3 - Automatic human handoff with fallback intent

Add automatic human handoff using fallback intent to your Dialogflow Agent

NOTE: this tutorial uses Dialogflow just as an example for a programmatic external chatbot integration. If you instead need to easily embed your Dialogflow Agent in your conversations, please use the Tiledesk Dialogflow Connector, the out-of-the-box Dialogflow integration that doesn't require programming skills.

Fork the tutorial code

We'll start from Dialogflow Tutorial 1, just adding a small library to our original endpoint.

You must use the code in Tutorial 1. The code is available on Github here.

Fork the tutorial code using the Fork button. Now you have a copy of the tutorial on your own repo.

Introduction

This time we'll give a try to the second endpoint already embedded into our nodejs app:

// Tutorial 3 - Automatic human handhoff based on fallback intent
var consecutive_fallback_count = {};
const MAX_FALLBACKS = 4;
app.post("/bot-fallback-handoff/:botid", (req, res) => {
  const tdclient = new TiledeskChatbotClient({request: req});
  console.log("tdclient", tdclient)
  const botid = req.params.botid;
  const supportRequest = tdclient.supportRequest
  // immediately reply back
  res.status(200).send({"success":true});
  // reply messages are sent asynchronously
  const dialogflow_session_id = supportRequest.request_id
  const lang = 'en-EN' // lang must be the same of the Dialogflow Agent
  const credentials = JSON.parse(process.env[botid])
  runDialogflowQuery(tdclient.text, dialogflow_session_id, lang, credentials)
  .then(function(result) {
    if (!consecutive_fallback_count[dialogflow_session_id]) {
      // init consecutive fallback count for this conversation
      consecutive_fallback_count[dialogflow_session_id] = 0
    }
    if (result.intent.isFallback) {
      consecutive_fallback_count[dialogflow_session_id]++
      console.log("fallback of", dialogflow_session_id, "is", consecutive_fallback_count[dialogflow_session_id])
    }
    else {
      // reset fallback on every positive hit.
      // here you can also evaluate result.intentDetectionConfidence
      // and consider it as a fallback if under some threshold value
      consecutive_fallback_count[dialogflow_session_id] = 0
    }
    if(res.statusCode === 200) {
      let msgs = [];
      if (consecutive_fallback_count[dialogflow_session_id] == MAX_FALLBACKS) {
        consecutive_fallback_count[dialogflow_session_id] = 0
        msgs.push({
          "text": "We are putting you in touch with an operator..."
        })
        msgs.push({
          "text": "\\agent",
          "attributes" : {subtype: "info"} // this message is hidden in the widget
        }) 
      }
      else {
        msgs.push({
          "text": result['fulfillmentText']
        })
      }
      msgs.forEach( m => {
        tdclient.sendMessage(m, function (err) {
          console.log("Message", m.text, "sent.");
        })
      })
    }
  })
  .catch(function(err) {
    console.log('Error: ', err);
  })
})

As in Dialogflow Tutorial 1 you have to create a Dialogflow agent, train the same Agent following the instructions in this tutorial, then go to Tiledesk and create an external bot and connect it to Routing (or to a Department).

How this code works

As you can see this new end point starts with thse two lines of code

var consecutive_fallback_count = {};
const MAX_FALLBACKS = 4;

The first variable consecutive_fallback_count saves the current number of fallbacks for every conversation. The second variable MAX_FALLBACKS represents the maximum number of consecutive fallbacks in a conversation.

In this tutorial, every time there is a fallback the number of consecutive fallbacks for the same conversation in incrememnted by one unit.

As soon as the total number of consecutive fallbacks reaches MAX_FALLBACKS a couple of messages is sent back to the client. The first message is shown to the client and is a custom message that you can send to indicate that the conversation is switching to humans. The second message \agent is intercepted by Tiledesk and drives the system to remove the bot and invite an agent to the conversation, following the Department rules.

msgs.push({
  "text": "We are putting you in touch with an operator..."
})
msgs.push({
  "text": "\\agent",
  "attributes" : {subtype: "info"} // this message is hidden in the widget
})

To hide a message simply add a sub-property subtype: 'info' to the attributes property of a message.

Enjoy Tiledesk!

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