Botpress how-to

Discussing practical issues that developers face when working with the Botpress framework

[botpress]

Accessing what the user just wrote

To access the text that the user wrote into a node (On Receive), you can user: {{event.payload.text}}

[botpress]

Starting chat bot with a greeting message

When testing the botpress chat bots, the bots wait for user input before entering the start/entry node, meaning that the user has the first turn. In Botpress parlance, the behaviour of making the bot take the first turn is called "proactive trigger".

The JavaScript code for triggering the start node automatically is available in the documentation under section "Send Message When the Webchat is Loaded"

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[botpress]

Detect if a question matches Q&A or not

Botpress has a built-in natural language understanding module that supports intent detection. It also includes a Q&A module, allowing you to match possible questions with predefined answers.

But how to detect if the user's utterance should be handled by the Q&A module or by the normal flow?

Two code snippets:

In the transition of the node that waits for user input, check if the recognized intent starts with "__qna__": event.nlu.intent.name.startsWith('__qna__') 

You can access by suggested answer by creating a custom action that sets a memory value, e.g.: temp.qna_answer = event.suggestions[0].payloads[0].text

[botpress]

Get JSON result of API call

Botpress provides a built-in skill to call an API but the official documentation doesn't say how to use the response the API provides.

TL;DR: {{temp.response.body.res}}

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