Working with the new QnA Intent in Oracle Digital Assistant 19.4.1 and later by Frank Nimphius

Starting Oracle Digital Assistant 19.4.1, you have two options to handle questions in a bot conversation.

· QnA Module – the QnA module in Oracle Digital Assistant allows you to upload frequently asked question documents that consist of one or many questions associated with a single answer. The QnA module uses elastic search to find the best matching answer or answers to a question. Dependent on how you configure the QnA module routing, bot users may get multiple hits for a question. Multiple possible answers to a question are shown in a carousel layout for the user to browse and select the answer she feels is the most relevant.
QnA modules are referenced from the System.QnA component that you add to a state in the skill dialog flow. The decision whether or not QnA is called, is then made by the intent engine through the System.Intent component. Again, depending on your configuration settings, the QnA module can be queried parallel to the intent model or only if the intent model does not resolve an intent for the user message.

· QnA intent – The new QnA intent allows you to return a defined an answer for a resolved intent. Intents that have a response defined will not be resolved by the System.Intent component, which means there is no need for you to create a dialog flow state to return the response. QnA intents are kind of a “QnA light” in that they don’t require any dialog flow settings and in that they only return a single answer, which sometimes is a customer requirement. The QnA intent is documented in the ODA product documentation.

This article provides a quick tutorial for you to try the new QnA intent. I assume you have access to Oracle Digital Assistant 19.4.1 or later and also assume you understand how to import skills using the Oracle Digital Assistant skill dashboard.

Exploring the QnA Intent Feature

To follow the instructions in this article, download the QnAIntents sample skill and import it to your Oracle Digital Assistant skills. Open the imported QnAIntents skill and notice the three intents. Each of these intents has a state defined in the dialog flow to handle it. The CancelPasta intent handling state returns a response for saying that users need to call the pasta shop to cancel an order. The OrderPasta intent involves multiple dialog flow state for the user to select a pasta to order. Read the complete article here.

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