Blocks

At the core of any digital assistant is the content. It's what the user sees and is what will answer all their questions. Within IntelAgent, that content is stored in Dialog Blocks also called Responses or Blocks for short.

From a simplistic point of view a block is a placeholder for content. If your bot is setup to handle multiple languages then that block will give you the option of specifying the response in each of the languages you support.

Blocks are typically connected to each other to form a dialog and as you'll see from the Visual Bot Editor by linking blocks together you can create a series of paths through your content. Typically blocks are triggered through the use of buttons within the content.

Blocks can be chained together by setting a value in the Next Response property. If for example you had two blocks - an Intro block and a Menu block, then you might want to set it up so that the next block from the Intro block, is the menu. Splitting the content like this into two blocks means that you are also able to set the Menu block as the next block from various other places without it needing to show the introduction each time. To the user, blocks chained like this will appear one after the other without needing the user to respond.

On the other hand, you can also specify the block to transition to after the next reply from the user. Using the On Reply setting you can create a situation whereby a user is asked a question, they type an answer and only after they've answered the question are they taken to the target block.

Another way blocks are used, is through Intents. An intent is the meaning behind a users question and we can use this to trigger a block without needing to go through a series of menus & buttons to find an answer. The intent that a block is associated with is shown under the Trigger section of a block.