Teneo Developers
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Greeting message

The Greeting message flow is the first flow to trigger when a user begins a dialog with your bot. This is the place where a bot should introduce itself and lay down the scope of the conversation. The Dialogue Resources are delivered with a pre-built greeting located in the top-level folder Greeting Message. The flow contains standard greeting responses, which you can adjust to match your use case. If you did not load solution with the Teneo Dialogue Resources template into your solution, you will need to create your own Greeting Message flow.

Greeting style

The greeting message holds the first words users hear from your bot, so you should try and make the most out of this introduction. Be sure to write something that encourages users to engage with your system.

This greeting would not be very effective in a business setting:

Bot: Say something.

But this greeting clearly guides user expectations:

Bot: Hi, my name is Botname of Artificial Solutions. I'm here to answer all your questions about ordering coffee online. How may I help you?

In other words, an effective way to begin the conversation is to:

  1. Introduce the system (use the bot's name, if it has one).
  2. Mention the company's name.
  3. Tell users what they can ask.

Remember, this is the one flow that users will definitely see, so be sure to put some thought into its preparation. These are stored as Global Variables in the Teneo Dialogue Resources and can be changed upon editing the value.

Trigger condition

The greeting flow uses a trigger with a TLML Syntax Match whose Syntax condition queries specific system annotations:

Init condition annotated

_%$INIT represents the event of the input being the first in a conversation. _%$EMPTY means that the user input does not contain any text. Together, these two conditions say: give the greeting message if the user did not start the conversation with a question. If the user has sent a question as the first input, we skip the greeting message and allow the input to be processed by the first best flow.

Activate in Tryout

You can trigger the greeting flow in Tryout by following these steps:

  1. Click on the Tryout to start a conversation.
  2. Click the Send button, leaving the input field blank.