I am currently using duckling to extract time values to create appointment. Since a person is allowed to send this message as two different messages, there are time when the messages come as the following:
– Can I come in tomorrow
– Sure what time?
– 3PM
This would create an appointment at 3PM tomorrow b/c duckling is able to extract tomorrow in the first message and 3PM in the second message.
However, if the time is given as just ‘3’, the time entity is not extracted by duckling.
Is it possible to have duckling recognize a single number (such as 3) as a time?
Hey @abhi, great question! Whether 3 is a time or a number of pizza slices, and whether it means 3pm or 3am, depends on the context. And Duckling doesn’t know this context, so it can’t help you directly
What you can do is to extract not just times but also numbers with Duckling (i.e. dimensions: ["time", "number", ...]. Assuming your bot asks about the time within a form, you’d then create a form validation action in which you can do some clever post-processing of the extracted number entity (e.g. add pm or am to it) and fill your time slot accordingly.
That makes a lot of sense. That is one of the routes I realized I might have to take. I wanted to be sure there wasn’t something else that I could do beyond treating it like a number and processing it. I will make that change and see how it works!
Hey thanks for the super helpful reply. I’m not sure how I missed that thread. I haven’t quite mastered the search function on here. The Information you shared above is great. I have been reading all you shared here. In this you explained everything very well. Thanks I am going to bookmark this http://forum.rasa.com/t/duckling-time-extraction/48479/reviews/.
