Bot Statement

The most fundamental of interactions, the bot Statement is the option to choose if you are expecting only a text response (rather than an email, phone number, date, etc). This is the best Interaction when you have no expectation of what the user's response might be. Think of it as a free-form text field.

The most basic type of interaction is the one where your bot makes a statement and interacts with the response. This is the fundamental building block of your bot’s structure.

To create this interaction, simply click 'Add new interaction/plugin' from near the upper left of the screen.

Next, from the 'Add new interaction' pop-up window choose the Bot Statement interaction. Then, give your new interaction a name, for example, ‘Welcome’:

Now you are directed to a box with all the functions you need for making a statement and having your bot respond to the user.

Start by clicking on bot’s message and typing your bot’s statement to the user. If this were the greeting step, for example, it would be something like: ‘Hello, I’m Chatterbot, the bot for Snatchbot.me. I’m here to help guide you through the process of making a bot. Would you like to know more about this?’

Next, you’ll want to connect this interaction with the relevant other interactions. So click the Add Connection button in the Connections tab:

Now you have all the options you need to tailor your bot to the responses you are getting. A simple example would be to choose from the drop-down boxes the options as follows:

If Response to this Interaction Contains the Whole Word 'YES' then Go To interaction Step Two. You can just as easily direct the answer NO to the appropriate interaction. Or, allowing for a variety of responses, choose If Response to this Interaction Doesn’t Contain Any Of YES then go to…

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Note

Note that the interactions that you are directing the user towards need to have already been created. Don’t worry if you need to leave a statement page to do this, all your work is automatically saved. Create the new interactions and then come back to this one.

So, create lots of interactions of this sort, carefully link them together and you’ll have the essential features of your bot in place.

You also have the option of setting a Fallback for a situation where none of the responses lead to progress along your connections. You can either leave this blank ('do nothing'), which will repeat the current interaction or choose an interaction to fall back to:

Watch this video tutorial to learn more about "How to get your chatbot to say something!"