yowl-dialog-manager

Multi-interaction dialog management for yowl

Install

$ npm install yowl-dialog-manager --save

Dialog Manager requires a persistent yowl session to handle dialog chaining and responses. IF YOU DO NOT USE ONE OF THESE, YOUR DIALOG MANAGERS WILL NOT WORK.

yowl-session-memory
yowl-session-redis
yowl-session-rethink

Example

var yowl = require('yowl');
var bot = yowl();
 
bot.name = "Dialog Bot";
 
var local = require('yowl-platform-cli');
bot.extend(local);
 
var memory = require('yowl-context-memory');
bot.use(memory);
 
var DialogManager = require('yowl-dialog-manager')();
 
DialogManager.add('greet', {
  test: function(context, event) {
    return !context.session.greeted;
  },
  messages: [
    "Hello there!",
    "This an example of a multi-step dialog.",
    "As a note, chaining dialogs between multiple interactions requires a persisted context.",
    "This dialog is an overly complicated echo example."
  ],
  after: function(context, event, callback) {
    context.session.greeted = true;
    this.manager.dialogs.step_1.play(context, event, callback);
  }
});
 
DialogManager.add('step_1', {
  messages: [
    "What is the message that you'd like me to echo back?"
  ],
  onresponse: function(context, event, callback) {
    context.session.echo = event.message;
    this.manager.dialogs.step_2.play(context, event, callback);
  }
});
 
DialogManager.add('step_2', {
  messages: [
    "You told me to echo \"{echo}\""
  ],
  after: function(context, event, callback) {
    delete context.session.echo;
    this.manager.dialogs.step_1.play(context, event, callback);
  }
});
 
bot.use(DialogManager);
 
bot.run();

Install all dependencies.

$ npm install --save yowl yowl-platform-cli yowl-dialog-manager yowl-context-memory

Then run your bot.

node bot.js --local

Usage

yowl-dialog-manager exports a Manager class that can be instantiated and then added to a bot with bot.use()

var yowl = require('yowl');
var bot = yowl();
 
var Manager = require('yowl-dialog-manager');
var myManager = Manager('namespace', { preserve_on_error: false });
 
bot.use(myManager);

The Manager has the following positional arguments:

• namespace (String, optional) - a unique namespace for this manager, required if you are using managers which have dialogs with clashing ids. You probably want to setup a namespace regardless.
• options (Object, optional) - an options object. currently, the only option is preserve_on_error (Boolean, default false) which, when set to true, will preserve the current dialog chain in the event of an uncaught error. You most likely want to leave this to false so that your users don't get stuck in a continous error loop.

Dialogs are added to the manager using Manager.add(dialog_id, dialog_object)

Dialogs have the following options.

• messages (Array or Function(context, event, callback), Optional) - If array, a list of strings to send to the user. If function, a function that returns an array of strings to send to the user. Strings are automatically interpolated using values from the local context.session. So if your context.session is { name: "Goose" } and your string is Hello there {name}!, the user will be sent Hello there Goose!. Variable names for interpolation can include multiple levels of properties (e.g. {user.name})
• actions (Array, Optional) - A list of actions to be sent back to the user. For more information on how actions work, you visis the capabilities documentation.
• test (Boolean or Function(context, event, callback), Optional, Default false) - This determines whether or not a dialog should be run. If this is a boolean, true will always cause the dialog to run and false will cause it to never run. If it's a function, the function should resemble function(context, event) { ... some code ... } and should return a boolean.
• onresponse (Function(context, event, callback), optional) - A function to run when the user responds to a dialog. When a dialog with onresponse defined is run, the manager will automatically ensure that the onresponse function is running when the user sends a new interaction. It must call callback.
• before (Function(context, event, callback), Optional) - A function to run before sending messages. It must call callback.
• after (Function(context, event, callback), Optional) - A function to run after sending messages. It must call callback.
• cascade (boolean, default false) - Whether or not to continue on to further methods in the bot

For onresponse, before and after (and messages if you are supplying a function), you may omit the third argument callback if you do not need to do any asynchronous processing.

Chaining Dialogs

You'll often want to call another dialog from the after or onresponse functions. This can be done by calling a dialog's play function. By default, all dialogs are available by their id on their associated manager's dialogs property.

DialogManager.add('step_1', {
  messages: [
    "When you respond, I'll call another dialog!!!"
  ],
  onresponse: function(context, event, callback) {
    context.user_message = event.message;
    this.manager.dialogs.step_2.play(context, event, callback);
  }
});
 
DialogManager.add('step_2', {
  messages: [
    "Here's the other dialog!!!",
    "You said {user_message}.",
    "Now we start all over again."
  ],
  after: function(context, event, callback) {
    delete context.user_message;
    this.manager.dialogs.step_1.play(context, event, callback);
  }
});

Organization

You can structure your project so you have multiple dialog managers in seperate files, and then include them all.

var onboardingDialogs = require('./dialogs/onboarding');
var settingsDialogs = require('./dialogs/settings');
var interactionDialogs = require('./dialogs/interactions');
 
bot.use(onboardingDialogs);
bot.use(settingsDialogs);
bot.use(interactionDialogs);