Patterns

When writing voice and text commands, you need to provide phrases that the user can say to invoke these commands, and phrases with which Alan AI will respond to the user. These phrases are known as patterns. Patterns can be used in all command and response functions:

For example:

Dialog script
intent('How is the weather today?', p => {
    p.play('It is great!');
});

Patterns with alternatives

Patterns may contain alternatives. Alternatives comprise a list of possible words and phrases for a command given by the user or for Alan AI’s reply. To provide alternatives in the pattern, use the | delimiter and enclose the alternative set in brackets ().

Let’s use the previous example to provide alternatives on what the user can ask and what the user can hear in response:

Dialog script
intent('(How is|What is) the weather today?', p => {
    p.play('(It is|Feels) great!');
});

Now the user can give the following commands: How is the weather today? and What is the weather today? In response the user will hear: It is great! or Feels great!

Note

Alan AI picks a response from the alternative set at random.

Multiple alternative sets

You can provide any number of alternatives in a set, and you can add as many sets of alternatives to a single pattern as you need. Let’s add multiple alternative sets to the command defined in the previous example and see how it will affect the total number of possible commands and received responses.

Dialog script
intent('(What|How) is the (weather|temperature) today?', p => {
    p.play('(It is|Feels) (great|awesome)!');
});

Now the user can give the following commands:

  • What the weather today?

  • What is the temperature today?

  • How the weather today?

  • How is the temperature today?

In response the user will hear: It is great!, It is awesome!, Feels great! or Feels awesome! picked at random.

Optional alternatives

In commands and responses, some parts of patterns may be optional. To mark a single word, phrase or even an alternative set as optional, you need to enclose it in brackets and add the | delimiter at the end of it. This will signal Alan AI that the command may be used both with and without the words specified with this optional part. The same logic applies to responses that Alan AI plays back to the user.

Let’s add optional alternatives to the command defined in the previous example and see how it will affect the total number of possible commands and received responses.

Dialog script
intent('(How is|What is) the (weather|temperature) (today|)', p => {
    p.play('(It is|Feels|) (great|awesome)!');
});

We’ve marked the today word as optional, so now the user can ask: How is the weather? or How is the weather today? Both commands will be valid. The same goes for responses. Now the first set of alternatives is optional, and the user will hear the responses like: It is great! or Feels great! as well as short responses like: Great! or Awesome!

Optional alternatives make Alan AI’s responses more diverse and help Alan AI reliably invoke commands added to the dialog script. When writing commands, elaborate all possible variants of the phrases the user can say. The closer the user’s utterance is to the intent pattern, the higher match score this intent will get. For details, see Intent matching.

Multiple patterns

If you add multiple alternative sets and optional alternatives to the pattern, you can run into a problem when some combinations of the pattern parts make no sense. In this situation, you can add multiple patterns to commands. Multiple patterns can also be helpful if you want to let users give the same command with completely different phrases or let Alan AI reply in different ways.

In Alan AI, you can define multiple patterns in command and response functions. To do this, you need to pass patterns to the desired function as comma separated strings.

Dialog script
intent("(How is|What is) the (weather|temperature) (today|)", "Today's forecast", p => {
    p.play("(It is|Feels|) (great|awesome)!", "Rainy, windy, and cold. (A complete mess!|)");
});

Multiple patterns can also be passed as an array.

Dialog script
let weatherRequests = [
    "(How is|What is) the (weather|temperature) (today|)",
    "today's forecast"
];

let weatherResponses = [
    "(It is|Feels|) (great|awesome)!",
    "Rainy, windy, and cold. (A complete mess!|)"
];

intent(weatherRequests,
    reply(weatherResponses));

Warning

Do not pass multiple patterns as arrays to the p.play() function. This function can be used to send commands to the client app. Arrays of any kind passed to the p.play() function are considered to be commands. To avoid errors in the script, use comma separated patterns in the p.play() function instead.

Patterns with slots

Patterns can contain slots — variables that help pick out important facts from users’ utterances. You can add one or more predefined and user-defined slots or even several slots of the same type to the pattern.

Dialog script
// User-defined slots
intent('Do you know anything about $(TOPIC physics|mathematics|chemistry)', p => {
    p.play('Yes. I do know ' + p.TOPIC.value + '. (Ask me anything about it!|)')
});

// Predefined slot
intent('How much is $(NUMBER) plus $(NUMBER)', p => {
    let result = p.NUMBERs[0].number + p.NUMBERs[1].number
    p.play(`It is ${result}`);
});

Wildcard for plural form of nouns

In some cases, users can pronounce nouns in commands in both single and plural forms. To let Alan AI capture all possible user inputs, add the _ character at the end of such a noun and enclose the noun in brackets (). This syntax signals Alan AI that the noun is expected in both single and plural forms.

Dialog script
intent('I want $(NUMBER) (cup_) of tea', p => {
    p.play('Here you go');
});

You can pluralize not only nouns, but also slots in patterns. The .value field of such a pluralized slot will contain the actual word in the form the user gave in the command.

Dialog script
intent('Add $(NUMBER) $(S pencil_)', p => {
    p.play(`Done. Added ${p.NUMBER.value} ${p.S.value}`);
});