Create your own Flow | Chatbot Library
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Create your own Flow

Flows are necessary to maintain and scalate a Chatbot, are you ready to go?

Check this doc

Or Look at this Tutorial in Spanish with Mizar.

Flows are extremely neccessary?

Imagine, you are going to create an amazing and complex chatbot, that complexity is hard to maintain all in mind, just think about the multiple contexts being opened and closed, this kind of complexity cant be scalated easily just by looking at all intents inside.

For these cases is when we need a lot a Flow, a Chart, a Diagram.

Flows can be achieved with easy tools?

Internet offers lot of easy tools to achieve the task of building a flow. In this tutorial we are going to aim two of them, show advantages, disadvantages and what is the recommend use for each one.

Lucidchart

Lucidchart is an UML app, has to tiers (free, premium). Is the app that I mostly use, it has multiple blocks, figures, arrows, and more.

Miro

Miro is a Community Colaborators app that let us to build flows within squares having commenting in real time.

Draw.io

Draw.io its an open source desktop application that let us create flows with dynamic block, isnt smooth as other 2 platform but has all features for free. This platform exels at exporting as pdf, other platforms doesnt have this feature.

How to Build Your Flow

First you have to be focused on the type of flow you are going to build, there are two types of flow, conversational model flow or conceptional model flow.

  • Conceptional flows are built with intent, entities, conditions blocks, is the most technical way to build a flow.
  • Conversational flows are built with Conversation blocks that makes the most functional way to show and implement.
  • I recommend using both models to track technical and functional behavior.

In order to build, lets take now our blocks and paste it in a way that have sense to us.

I recommend putting first the basics blocks/intents that are referenced by the basic intents (welcome, thanks, bye, menu, etc) after that we can deal with other complex funcitonalities like (restaurants, schedule, prescription etc)

Keep en mind that this flow you have been built is the reflexion of your Chatbot's Behavior.

Basic Flow intents

When creating a bot, we have to manage common intents like welcome, thanks and bye. For these intents I recommend to create a first flow, called welcome flow or essencial flow.

So create the flow with these basics intents, then create intents and keep contexts already registered.

Prioritize Flows

When creating a big Chatbot, we have to prioritize which flows are important, so they are developed first, think about what is the most essencial flow. Keep and eye on it and develop.

Testing a Flow

Once you got your flow created remember to have a list of words that help you test your chatbot, this can really speed up testing progress while you are paying attention to the important thing, bot understand, bot is working as expected.