Why is my bot not responding the way I want it to?

There are a couple of problems you might encounter as a starting bot developer. In this article you will learn how to find and fix problems with your bot.

User asks a question, bot doesn't give the expected response

• Open the Test your bot window and type the expression that returns an unexpected result.

• Go to the NLP result tab

• Check to see if an intent was detected with a confidence above the threshold (the default threshold is 80%).

If an intent was detected with > 80% confidence

• Go to the bot dialogs table view

• Filter on the intent that was detected

• If there is no result for that intent, it means that your intent doesn't have an answer linked to it, which will mean the bot defaults to not understood.

  • Solution: configure an answer to the intent by adding a new bot message, and linking the intent to it.

• If there is a bot dialog that has that intent linked to it, click on it

  • Solution: configure the bot message linked to the intent and make sure it's aligned with how you want the bot to reply. Alternatively, if the intent should not be linked to that bot message, remove the link between bot dialog and intent and create a new bot dialog for that intent.

If no intent was detected with > 80% confidence

• Check your NLP model. Does an intent already exist where this expression belongs to?

• If yes, add the expression to the model, click Update NLP and test your bot again.

• If no, create a new intent, add the expression and a few others like it to the new intent and update your NLP model.

Make sure you follow our NLP training best practices when creating new intents and expressions.

• Create a new bot dialog, link the intent to that bot dialog, and define an answer the bot should give as a reply to your new intent.