Lesson 3

Intro to Managing Conversational Pathways

This lesson addresses the creation and management of conversational pathways.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

  • Retrieve pathway information using GET operations

  • Create and update pathways with POST operations

  • Delete pathways using DEL operations

TABLE OF CONTENTS▼

    Conversational Pathways and Their Uses

    While simple and call endpoints with prompts are powerful tools for creating AI phone agents, the Conversational Pathways module empowers you to build even more intricate and function-rich architectures.  

    Allowing external API calls (like searching the web), incorporating knowledge bases (vector stores from the previous lessons), land response-based decision making are just some of the features that make Conversational Pathways so useful in real world and Enterprise use-cases.

    Why Use Conversational Pathways?

    Why Use Conversational Pathways?

    Why Use Conversational Pathways?

    Why not just use the simple and calls interface for constructing your agents? Conversational Pathways have several major advantages over our regular calling functions.

    Greater Dialog Control

    Give your agent instructions on how it should respond at specific points of the conversation. Choose between prompting or fixed sentences.

    Webhooks

    Execute webhooks at any point during the conversation, and send speech during/after the webhook.

    End Call

    Describe conditions for ending calls and control exactly when your agents disconnects.

    Knowledge Base

    Build specific knowledge stores that your agents can reference as needed to answer questions that occur during the call.

    What You Will Learn in This Lesson

    This lesson will provide an overview of the components of conversational pathways and equip you with examples to help you start building your own.

    An In-Depth Look at the Conversational Pathway Interface

    General Principles - Pathway Agents

    Pathway agents work like flow charts. They follow instructions and move from node to node until they reach the end of a path (the end of the call).

    The agent starts at the first node and then decides on a pathway to take to move on to the next one. This process will continue until the agent decides to end the call, or the user hangs up.

    Quick Pathway Example

    1. In this example, at the node named “Ask for reservation info,” the node asks for the user’s reservation information.

    2. The agent will move on to the next node based on the user’s response. Which node it moves on to is determined by 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.

    3. If the user has provided information for a reservation for fewer than eight guests, the agent will move on to the node called “Reservation Booking.”

    4. If the user has provided information for a reservation for more than eight (or eight or more?) guests, the agent will move on to the node called “Transfer Call.”

    Using 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.

    Using the same example above,  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.

    NEXT

    Handling Inbound and Outbound Numbers

    Handling Inbound and Outbound Numbers

    Handling Inbound and Outbound Numbers

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