Assistant Fields

Overview

Assistant Fields can be used to temporarily store information during a bot interaction with a customer that can be used to make decisions within your flow.

Assistants Fields are similar to Custom Fields, but the information is not permanently stored with the conversation, it’s only used to keep track of data during a bot session.

As an example, you may want to increment a counter each time the customer lands on a fallback behavior. If they have been there more than 3 times, you could offer them the ability to speak to an agent.

Creating Assistant Fields

Assistant Fields can be created or edited from within the Configuration Panel by selecting the Data Fields option:

You must configure a Label, Description, ID and Type for each field. The type of the fields can be Text, Boolean, Integer or Select.

Using Assistant Fields

Once an Assistant Field is created, it can be used in Decisions and in Set Field and Add to Field (if it’s an Integer) Actions in your flow.

Assistant Fields can also be created when adding a Set Field or Add to Field action, or a Decision Condition. Selecting the Add New Assistant Field button next to the field selector drop-down will open the dialog to create a new Bot Field.

Upon choosing this action, you must then choose the field that you would like to set and provide a corresponding value:

Adding to a Numeric Field

Your Assistants can also be configured to add to numeric fields. Simply choose the ‘Add to a numeric field’ action and specify the amount and which field it should be added to.

In this case, testNumeric’s value will be increased by 5. Subtraction can be achieved by specifying a negative amount. This action is useful when you want your bot to maintain some sort of running total or score. For example, you might maintain a score based on the customer’s responses to various questions and ultimately use the score to decide how to route the conversation.

If you don’t see any available fields to add to then you need to request that a numeric custom field be added to your site. Please send your request to [email protected].

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Custom Field Vs Assistant Field

If you want information to be available as part of the conversation details to be reviewed later, like in a Closed Conversation CSV export, you should use a Custom Field to store the information, not an Assistant Field.

Assistant Fields are stored within the Assistant definition, and created right in AI Studio while configuring your flow. This means that if you export an Assistant with a set of Assistant Fields in one tenant, you can easily import it into a different tenant without having issues with dependencies that may occur with custom fields.