Request: Appropriate Null Slot Handling

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ArloGilbert asked · Jul 10, 2016 at 05:23 AM

Request: Appropriate Null Slot Handling

Currently when Alexa recognizes an intent that has two slots in both the utterances and in the intent json, sometimes it does not capture all of the slots. So as an example MYAPP has "PlayIntent" intent with slots "artist" and "location" so I can say "tell MYAPP to play {artist} in {location}".

Alexa never fails to send the {artist} slot but sometimes the second slot is not captured and not sent to the lambda code. The result is a lot of ridiculous dancing around how to (in node) do an response.ask and then do a lot of conditional watching for sessions and prompt for the {location} node.

Given that Alexa Skills Kit KNOWS it didn't hear one of my slots, it would seem appropriate for the developers of the skills kit to implement one OR both of these solutions:

1) Allow a slot to be marked as "required" and automatically or through the intents JSON prompt the user for the missing information.

2) Set Alexa Skills Kit to parse the response JSON and allow developers to force the intent for the next call in the session. This seems like a much more useful approach given that voice interaction is most easily managed as stepped conversations in order to eliminate the requirement for users to memorize complex commands.

I don't even know if the Alexa skills kit team reads this forum, but if they do, please please please consider these suggestions. Right now building for ASK is a lot like handling web forms where a failed submit resets the entire form and we can't do any validation before submission.

alexa skills kit alexa

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2 Answers

Answer 1 · 2016-07-11T14:27:03Z

jjaquinta answered · Jul 11, 2016 at 02:27 PM

I think the way it works right now is just fine. You are told what Alexa understands. A partial result is better than no result at all. That way you can degrade gracefully and handle it the way you want to, rather than some arbitrary way that Alexa wants to.

It's a fairly elementary programming exercise to handle the flow. It might seem like a "ridiculous dance" if you have never done it before. But that sort of handling is pretty common in just about every programming task I've seen. It keeps you in control of your user experience.

You might reference the state machine template TsaTsaTzu produced, if you are looking for techniques for handling partially filled multi-slot intents.

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Answer 2 · 2016-07-11T19:00:01Z

NickG@Amazon answered · Jul 11, 2016 at 07:00 PM

I think there is more an issue with your assumption here that "Alexa Skills Kit KNOWS it didn't hear one of my slots". To humans it seems that way. We generally know what we are looking for and the actual words we hear, but computers don't work that way. They assign probabilities and confidence levels to many possibilities and go with the highest ones based on context, but don't really "know" if it actually "hears" one particular slot.

The other problem is these pesky things called users. Much as you might want them to read the instructions and only do utterances which you define, being the pesky things they are, they often go and say totally different things, parts of utterances, and completely scrambled utterances. The slot model is designed to allow Alexa to try and untangle things as much as it can, but in cases where it can't or the user hasn't said the right thing, it leaves it up to your service to determine the right course of action given the inputs.

In your example there might be a number of possible options. Your skill might be able to gracefully degrade and still play the artist using a default location, or it might simply reprompt you for just the location, or with a bit less logic, the entire utterance in it's proper form. Letting your skill do this instead of the Alexa service allows much more flexibility in regards to how all these options are handled.

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Request: Appropriate Null Slot Handling

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