Behavior

Last Updated: 25.10.2019

Overview

With behavior, you can instruct Hala what should be done next after the triggering the dialog node.

There are next available options for behavior:

Type	Description
Wait for user response	Hala will wait for the user response before moving to another dialog node. For example, in the output, you might ask to provide the City in which the user wants to get the weather forecast. The dialog will not progress until the user provides the response.
Skip the user response	Use this option if you do not want to wait for the user response and go directly to the child nodes for the evaluation of the conditions.
Redirect to ...	Use this option when you want the dialog to go directly to a different dialog node.

To enable the Skip the user response option at first you need to create the child nodes

To enable the Redirect to... option at first you need to create others dialog nodes, where you want to be redirected

How to use

Wait for the user response

Еhis option is set by default. It represents the standard behavior of the chat: Hala response, then User response, then Hala response and so on.

Skip the user response

For example, you have a root node with the condition intent.get_weather. Users will trigger this node when they write something like this "give me a weather forecast" or "weather forecast for tomorrow in Tallinn."

The utterance "weather forecast for tomorrow in Tallinn" already includes the information about the city and date, that is why we need to handle this information.

Your dialog tree can look like this:

So if you will put the Skip the user response in the root node, Hala will start to evaluate the conditions of the child nodes without waiting for an answer from the user. Because the user input includes the word Tallinn that matched with values in the entity entity.city, Hala will trigger this node. If the first utterance would not include the word Tallinn, then Hala will trigger the child node with the condition not_recognised.

When you are adding the Actions, Hala automatically set the behavior type Skip the user response

Redirect to...

When you are building the skills, in many cases, you will have a situation when you need to redirect from one node to another node. Why will you need this? Because without this option, you would need to duplicate the logic of the nodes.

Simple example:

Assume the user will write "Weather forecast." Then following the logic and example in the previous section we will trigger the node Child node 1.2. After this, we will ask the user to specify the city, and here we have two options on how to move forward:

Option 1 - Without using the option Redirect to...

Option 2 - With using the option Redirect to...

As you can see, if you will not use the option Redirect to... you would need to add additional dialog nodes (Child node 1.2.1.1) that will duplicate the existing dialog nodes (Child node 1.1.1). It is a straightforward example, but when you need to duplicate 10 or 20 nodes, it takes a long time, that is why option Redirect to... can help you.