How to build your bot?
Learn key concepts to help with understanding and building your bot.
Estimated reading time: 10 minutes
Bot is an abbreviation of the word “Robot”. Basically, it’s an automated tool that executes several pre-programmed tasks. It is usually associated with artificial intelligence and seeks to interact by emulating human behavior.
Other essential terms when we talk about bots:
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Chatbots
This is the bot tool with which most people will interact with every day. The words “chat” and “robot” are merged to refer to these famous chatbots or “chatting robots”. These are communication tools used to simulate interaction with a human operator and help with automating processes.
How do I build a bot in Botmaker?
If you want to build a bot in Botmaker, it is vital you understand some terms that we use in all our help articles so you can familiarize yourself with them:
What is an intent?
An intent is a framework that allows you to define the answers the bot will offer to users based on their questions, conversations, phrases, words, or conditions (defined in the platform as “triggers”).
Making an intent consists of 3 steps:
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Name: used to organize and describe the content of the bot’s responses.
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Triggers: these are what that activate intents. The triggers can be: understanding a user’s message or inactivity time. It is not necessary to set an activator since we can enable the intent directly without a trigger (we will discuss this in “How to answer with actions?”)
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Response: The response is what the bot will reply to the user’s intentions, in other words, what the bot will answer when the user sends a message or acts in a specific message.
In the video below, you can see how to create an intent and also where the fields we listed before are found.
The following is an overview of the intent window that will appear once you create one.
Focus point – Intent setting
Within an intent, on the NAME tab, you will find two options that can be enabled:
Show a quick answer to the user’s suggestion: When this option is enabled, it will appear as a fast response for the operator. So, if the client asks a question that has already been answered by the bot, the assistant can activate it and offer a faster answer.
Show this intent in the chat header: With this option, you can create buttons in the chat screen that the operator can enable in the middle of the conversation, such as ending a call, sending a customer satisfaction survey and more. In short, you can create an intent that the operator can activate for the user at any time.
In the video, you can see where these functions can be found: