Create your First Intent | Chatbot Library
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Create your First Intent

Its Time to create your own Intent on your backend

Or Look at this Tutorial in Spanish with Mizar.

Why we create intents with Zaroc?

We can create Intents on Dialogflow, and thats fine but we can Enhance these Intents with some backend. With backend we can create custom responses depeding of variables like Dates, Mathematical Operations, Specific parameters and more...

So in order to let you know, I'll show you how to Create your Own Intent.

We are obiously Creating and Intent on Dialogflow, but you'll learn how to create in a structural way...

So lets go!

1.- Creating an Intent on Dialogflow

Creating an Intent is Really, Really Easy. At the Left Navbar, click on Intents and after that click on the big blue Button that says Create Intent

When Creating an Intent we have to take care of some Sections, right now we are just going to use just few of them.

  • Name your Intent, try to be specific and have a structure, for myself I tend to use 'category_name_path_variation' but for the sake of this tutorial we are going to create basics_welcome intent
  • This Intent will have as Tranining Phrases Words or Entities Related to 'Welcome, Hello's and Byeing'
  • As a response, I recommend you to use a default Response with a specific naming convention, this is 'intent name' with an explosion emoji 💥, we are using this because, when the intent gets executed, if the call to our backend fail, this message will be triggered, so this message help us when troubleshooting.
  • Finally we need to click on the first button inside the Webhook Section

2.- Creating an Intent on our Backend

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Keep in Mind

See our doc files hierachy, you can see all the intents inside of the Intents Folder, Intents are saved per Category on document and per Users on Folders.

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  • So for now we are going to create a file named 'basics.php' cause this will have all the basics intents (Intents that have basics as category) example : basics_bye, basics_thanks and so on...

  • Let's go inside of the basics.php and look at this code example

<?php

    if(intent('basics_welcome')){
        //if the intent is basics_welcome code here will be executed
    }

?>

Cause we are using PHP as our backend we have to use Open and Close Tags to code in php, so we are using <?php at the begin and ?> at the end of the file.

Also we should use a Zaroc Function called 'intent'. this function receives a name (name of the intent) and If you trigger that intent the code inside the brackets.

For more information about Intent function check documentation

Right now if the user trigger this intent, we want to prepare a response from our backend. For this case we are going to use the funcion 'wsStructureTemplate' these function that ends in Template are Template functions and help us sending data in specific formats. For this example just copy the code below.

$session = [];                                              #array

$wsTextArray = [                                          #array
                "Paragraph Title1",
                "Paragraph Title2"
                ];         

$structure = [
            'paragraph'
            ];                                     #array
$components = [                                                 #array-multi
    [$wsTextArray]
];

wsStructureTemplate($session,$structure,$components);

This code is creating some Variables and Arrays.'$session' is a variable that isnt important right now

'$wsTextArray' must be an Array (Required) here we are going to set a message, you can use text and emojis by the moment. Put whatever you like.

And at the end we have 'wsStructureTemplate'

This function creates an Structure that dialogflow can understand (Template) and is sent as a Response to dialogflow

All done by Zaroc behind scenes

You can think that we are done but there's at least one step to do.

Let's connect this intent to the core chatbot file

As you see in the core file, we are requiring all that makes our bot work.

You will see a commented section that says 'Intents'

Let's require the file basics.php

require_once("intents/basics.php");

With this we should be able to trigger basics_intent easily

Let's save the changes and lets test

Right now you should be able to test the chatbot

If you get the message that you put on your backend, you did it!

Errors

Keep an Eye

If you got the error message or a default message please