Educating your chatbot with unanswered messages

The key to teaching your chatbot how to answer questions is to observe Unanswered Messages and educate your chatbot how to respond to them. Unanswered Messages are the bot whisperers' best friends!

Unanswered Messages

To see the list of unanswered messages, in Chatbot Studio with the correct bot selected:

1. Click the Unanswered Messages option on the left-hand menu.

2. Optionally, you can adjust the date range of the unanswered messages by changing the From/to fields. 

The Unanswered Messages view lists all the messages your chatbot has not been able to answer. You will see what the Message was, the Time it was sent, and if the chatbot has suggestions for matching intent, how strong it thinks the Suggestion quality is.

Icons to the right of each unanswered message lets you either:

• Add the message to an existing intent.
• Mark this message as "done", if you want to remove the message from the list without adding it to an intent.

Note that unanswered messages will only be listed if the chatbot is connected to a chat platform. Testing the chatbot in Chatbot Studio’s own Bot preview screen will never create unanswered messages.

Message context

Sometimes it can be useful to see the context the question was asked in. Perhaps an earlier reply can be edited so the next customer will not need to ask the question.

1. Click the unanswered message.

If the message is one that you want the bot to be able to answer in the future, you will need to add the message to an intent. In either the Unanswered messages list or the Conversation detail page:

1. Click the Add to intent's queries icon, .

The Add to intent's queries dialog opens, showing the message, and allowing you to choose an intent to match with.

2. Optionally, you can edit the message in the User says field. Perhaps tidying up the way the customer asked the question, perhaps to generalise the questions, removing any specific details. Either way, note that the matching only considers the first 100 characters in the message. 
3. In the Suggested Intents tab, click the Intent name to see a list of suggestions for matching intents.
4. Click to select an appropriate intent, if there is one.

5. Alternatively, if none of the suggested intents are a good match, click the All intents tab.
6. Again, click the Intent name drop-down list, this time to see a list of all intents for this bot.
7. Click to select an appropriate intent, if there is one.

In either tab, if you have selected an intent:

8. To see more information about the selected intent, click the Go to intent link.
9. Once you are happy you have selected the appropriate intent, click the Save button.

Once the message has been added to a intent, the yellow icon in the Conversation detail page will turn green, and if it was the last Unanswered Message in that conversation, it will disappear from your list.

Creating a new intent

If no relevant intent exists, you might consider making a new intent. In the Add to intent's queries dialog, on the All intents tab:

1. Click the Intent name dop-down list.
2. Click the Create new intent option.

3. Type a Name for the new intent.
4. Type the appropriate Reply.
5. Click the Create button.

The unanswered message will be automatically added as a query to this new intent. You can then edit it in the Intents page to add any further details, including alternatives to the query.