How do I ensure the chatbot gives the right answers?

Chatbot Troubleshooting

When your chatbot has been live and operational for a while, it will have handled many conversations. Some will be successful, while others may not be as effective. One common issue is when a user's question triggers an incorrect answer or flow. This usually happens when the utterance is matched to an incorrect intent.

What Can You Do?

There are several things you can do to optimize question recognition and ensure your bot provides the correct answers:

  • Train your intents by adding extra sample utterances.
  • Map user utterances to the correct intent.
  • Add missing intents and use cases to your bot (this topic is more about design and organization, and is not covered in this manual).

Add Extra Utterances to an Intent

Your chatbot uses intents and natural language processing (NLP), an algorithm that analyzes user utterances and links them to the correct bot flows and answers. It learns to match questions and answers by processing real-life utterances.

As you build your bot and add more intents, it's important that each intent has enough utterances to properly train the system for that specific question. If there aren’t enough utterances, your bot may struggle to match questions to the correct intent, and as a result, provide inaccurate answers.

How to add extra Utterances to an Intent

You can add utterances to your intent directly from within your dialog:

  1. Click on the intent.
  2. In the turn editor, add extra utterances.
  3. Save your intent.

If you want to batch edit a lot of intents, it’s easier to add utterances in the article Understanding, under  the Intents section.

Map Utterances to the Right Intent

When analyzing chatbot sessions in Analyze, you may find that user questions are mapped to the wrong intent or are not mapped to any intent at all. In these cases, you can manually correct the mapping so that the utterance is associated with the right intent.

Step 1: Locate the User Utterance

In your chatbot session, navigate to the user utterance that you want to correct. For example, you may find that the user did not want to order a pizza, but instead wanted to check the status of their pizza order.

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Step 2: Select the Correct Intent

To correct this, go to the user utterance "What is the status of my order?" and click on the system.noresponse intent. This will open the Add utterances window.

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Step 3: Map the Utterance

In the Add utterance window, select the intent to which you want to add the utterance. In this case, the utterance "What is the status of my order?" fits best with the system.status intent, which contains a flow where the user can provide their email for status updates.

Step 4: Save the Mapping

Click Add to map the utterance to the selected intent.

Tip 💡

Regularly analyzing your chatbot sessions and correcting any mismatched utterances will significantly improve the accuracy of your chatbot!

Add Missing Intents and Use Cases

To learn more about adding intents to your bot, refer to the article Understanding and read the section about intents.