Understanding bot conversations - Amazon Lex

Understanding bot conversations

After you build a bot, you integrate your client application with the Amazon Lex V2 runtime operations to hold conversations with your bot. When a user starts a conversation with your bot, Amazon Lex V2 creates a session. A session encapsulates the information exchanged between your application and the bot. For more information, see Understanding Amazon Lex V2 bot sessions.

A typical conversation involves a back and forth flow between the user and a bot. For example:

User : I'd like to make an appointment
Bot : What type of appointment would you like to schedule?
User : dental
Bot : When should I schedule your dental appointment?
User : Tomorrow
Bot : At what time do you want to schedule the dental appointment on 2021-01-01?
User : 9 am
Bot : 09:00 is available, should I go ahead and book your appointment?
User : Yes
Bot : Thank you. Your appointment has been set successfully.

Use the RecognizeText or RecognizeUtterance API operations to manage the conversations yourself. Use the StartConversation API operation to let Amazon Lex V2 manage the conversation for you.

To manage the conversation, you must send user utterances to the bot until the conversation reaches a logical end. The current conversation is captured in session state. The session state is updated after each user utterance. The session state contains the current state of the conversation and is returned by the bot in a response to each user utterance.

A conversation can be in any of the following states:

  • ElicitIntent – Indicates that the bot has not yet determined the user's intent.

  • ElicitSlot – Indicates that the bot has detected the user's intent and is gathering the required information to fulfill the intent.

  • ConfirmIntent – Indicates that the bot is waiting for the user to confirm that the information collected is correct.

  • Closed – Indicates that the user's intent is complete and that the conversation with the bot reached a logical end.

A user can specify a new intent after the first intent is completed. For more information, see Conversation context with your Lex V2 bots.

An intent can have the one of the following states:

  • InProgress – Indicates that the bot is gathering information necessary to complete the intent. This is in conjunction with the ElicitSlot conversation state.

  • Waiting – Indicates that the user requested the bot to wait when the bot asked for information for a specific slot.

  • Fulfilled – Indicates that the business logic in a Lambda function associated with the intent ran successfully.

  • ReadyForFulfillment – Indicates that the bot gathered all of the information required to fulfill the intent and that the client application can run fulfillment business logic.

  • Failed – Indicates that an intent has failed.

See the following topics to learn how to use Amazon Lex V2 APIs to manage conversation context and sessions between your bot and users.

Topics