Navigating between tabs (Ionic React)

If your Ionic React app has several tabs, you can add voice commands to navigate through the app. In this tutorial, we will use a simple Ionic app with three tabs to demonstrate how to use voice commands to switch between them.

What you will learn

• How to send commands from the dialog script to an Ionic React app

• How to set up the Alan AI’s event listener and handle commands on the app side

• How to navigate between tabs in an Ionic React app with voice

What you will need

To go through this tutorial, make sure the following prerequisites are met:

• You have completed the following tutorial: Building a voice agent for an Ionic React app.

• The environment for using the Ionic framework is properly set up. For details, see Ionic documentation.

We will use an example Ionic React app provided by Alan AI. You can also use your own app with several tabs. Make sure you have added the Alan AI button to the app as described in the previous tutorial.

Note

In this tutorial, we use Ionic React Router to navigate in the app. This component is already added to the example Alan AI app. If you prefer using your own app for this tutorial, make sure it has Ionic React Router. For details, see Ionic documentation.

Step 1: Add voice commands for navigation

We need to add a new command to the dialog script to navigate between tabs with voice. In Alan AI Studio, open the project and in the code editor, add the following intent:

Dialog script

const ordinalsMap = {
    "first": 1,
    "second": 2,
    "third": 3,
};

intent('Go to the $(TAB: first, second, third..) tab', p => {
    if (ordinalsMap.hasOwnProperty(p.TAB.value)) {
        let tabNumber =  ordinalsMap[p.TAB.value];
        p.play({command: 'navigation', tabNumber: tabNumber});
        p.play(`Opening the ${p.TAB.value} tab`);
    } else {
        p.play('The tab with this number is not found');
    }
});

The user can now give a voice command to go to a specific tab in the app. In the intent, we use the TAB slot. This slot allows us to catch the ordinal number in the user utterance. If the caught number is first, second or third, the navigation command and the tab number will be sent from the dialog script to the app. If the voice command contains some other number, the AI agent will report that such tab is not found.

Step 2: Handle commands on the app side

Now, when we say, for example, Go to the second tab, Alan AI sends the navigation command and the 2 tab number to the app. We need to handle this command on the app side and make sure the app opens the necessary tab when the command is received.

In the Ionic app, go to src/components and open the AlanBtn.tsx file. In the useEffect hook, we have the code for the Alan AI button event listener. Here we subscribe to events received from the dialog script and define how our app must react to these events.

Let’s update the if block for the event listener:

AlanBtn.tsx

const AlanBtn: React.FC = (props: any) => {
  const alanBtnComponent = useRef<any>(null);

  useEffect(() => {
    alanBtnComponent.current.addEventListener('command', (data: CustomEvent) => {
      const commandData = data.detail;
      /* If the navigation command is received, go to the tab with the specified number */
      if (commandData.command === 'navigation') {
        props.history.push(`/tab${commandData.tabNumber}`);
      }
    });
  }, []);

  return <alan-button ref={alanBtnComponent} alan-key="YOUR_KEY_FROM_ALAN_STUDIO_HERE" />;
};

Here is how it works: when our app receives the navigation command from the dialog script, we use the push method to go to the tab having the number obtained from the user utterance.

You can test it: run the app, click the Alan AI button and say: Go to the second tab. The app will open the second tab. Then say: Go to the fifth tab. The AI agent will reply: The tab with this number is not found.