The conversation

Flows and states

In most chatbots, you can think of the conversation as a set of states. Each state represents a specific point in conversation, e.g. you might have states for greeting, telling a joke, recommending restaurants and so on. Take a look at this picture: (TODO picture)

Golem provides a dialog manager that makes it easy to define and move between these states. We further group states by the conversation topic into so-called flows, which you can use to split your bot into smaller independent packages.

Each state consists of:

• a unique name, in format "flow.state"
• an action that will be run when the state is activated
• (optional) requirements of the action

The conversation begins in a flow called default. Each flow starts in the root state. Whenever a message with intent greeting is received, the bot moves to the greeting.root state.

Each action can either be a hardcoded message sent to the user, or a python function. This function must take one parameter - dialog (more on that later).

The bot moves between states when:

• the extracted intent or entity matches one of flows
• you set the next parameter or you return a state name from an action

Flows and states can either be defined directly in Python, or using the YAML (/JSON) markup language.

For example:

greeting:
  - name: root
    action:
      text: "Hello there!"
      next: "greeting.help:"
  - name: help
    action: actions.custom_function

You also need to register the flow in the BOTSsection of GOLEM_CONFIG, as shown on the previous page. This way, you can easily enable and disable modules of your chatbot using the config file.

You can continue to Conversations in YAML or TODO.