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A first glance at the builder

Narratory's builder uses an intuitive way to build dialog and allows you to build complex chat behavior without having to write any code. It is based on a battle-tested graphical programming toolset developed at MIT.

The builder allows you to build and test your bot straight in your browser, showcased below:

Builder intro

Building blocks explained#

The top level building blocks of Narratory are called Narratives. A Narrative typically represents some logical part of your bot and contains:

  1. a flow of Bot Initiatives
  2. a selection of User Initiatives

Bot initiatives#

A Narrative consists of a flow/sequence of Bot Initiatives (i.e the bot taking the initiative - likely by saying something to the user - and then a following dialog) - for example:

  • greeting the user, introducing itself and then asking the user for his/her name and age
  • taking an order - first asking for a main, then optional sides and drinks
  • conducting a troubleshooting for the user in a customer service errand

User Initiatives#

Each Narrative can also have a selection of user initiatives that allows the user to, at any time in the narrative, to take control of the dialog, for example by asking a related question. Once the bot is done by handling the user initiative, it will continue where it was in the narrative.

Natural Language Understanding#

Whenever you hand over the turn to the user, the bot will use Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to try to understand what the user says. Each User turn has an associated Intent which you define under the intents-section. An intent can optionally have Entities - data points that can be extracted from the utterances that users say.

Get started#

To get started using the graphical builder, we recommend:

  1. The Hello world video tutorial
  2. Creating your first app here
  3. Learning more by reading the documentation Narrative docs