Instruments®
Instruments® is a new way to use the chatbot. With Instruments®, your users may not only ask questions about your products but also get help with data that is out of the scope of your documentation. The examples of such interactions are (not limited to):
- ask for a parcel status
- connect to a third-party API and ask the chatbot to handle the obtained data
- connect to your inner API
- open any webpage on the Internet, read its content, and ask questions about it
- run a query against another project
- extract data from JSON.
Let's review how to install and use the simplest instrument to check the parcel's status.
Install the instrument
Open the instruments market page. It can be found on your project's menu:
You can check the details of the instrument by clicking the Details button:
Click the Install button to install the instrument. The status of it will change and you will see the following message:
Disable/enable it
Now, if you open the My instruments page and click the details of your instrument, you can disable/enable it. It may be convenient if you want to keep an instrument but just prefer to switch it off temporarily:
Provide your project description
When you enable at least one instrument, the workflow inside the program slightly changes. Now, it has to make a decision if the instrument should be called, or if it's just a normal query about your data. So, the querying data is just another instrument that works transparently. To be able to make the right decision, the descriptions for each instrument should be provided. We usually get the current project description and it's enough in many cases, but sometimes users forget to provide it. So, we show you that you need to provide this description for your project right on the top of the "My Instruments" page:
As soon as you click the cog icon, the small popup is open. You enter a short description of your project, for example, "Provides the information about my XYZ product, its features and pricing.". It may be more specific, for example "Provides the information about drones".
Click the "Save settings" button and you are set to go!
Ask a question about your parcel
Now, open your Interaction page or type right in your chatbox something like "What is status of my delivery?". The chatbot will ask you to provide your tracking number, after entering it you will know where your parcel is: