Optional progression in stories?

Rasa Open Source
1

Suppose I have a story that ends with the user confirming or denying something.

## some story
* some_root_intent
  - some_action1
  - some_action2
  - utter_ask_is_that_what_you_wanted
> some_checkpoint

## User affirmed
> some_checkpoint
* affirm 
  - utter_glad_to_hear
  - action_restart

## User denied
> some_checkpoint
* deny
  - some_other_action
  - action_restart

The issue I’m having with this is that these substories make the conversation lock up and the next user message is forcefully processed as either affirming or denying. I want to make the “yes/no” part of the conversation optional and ignorable, and the bot goes back to its “ready for any story” state (which I guess would be action_restart) including restarting this very story itself.

One idea that I had in mind was to make a sort of “recursive” substory, that is,

## some story
> checkpoint_root_intent_triggered
* some_root_intent
  - some_action1
  - some_action2
  - utter_ask_is_that_what_you_wanted
> some_checkpoint

## deny
> some_checkpoint
* some_root_intent
> checkpoint_root_intent_triggered

Obviously this is a very hacky method that’s just WAITING to trigger some weird behaviour. That, along with the fact that it becomes impractical because you’d have to write these recursive substories for every other “story root” intent as well.

As such, what is the best way to incorporate an “optional” (sub)story into my bot?

1 Like
2

I was facing a similar problem. What I did is that I put a action_restart at the end of the main story (after asking the user if he liked the solution or not) and I had two very small stories, one for the case if the user just affirmed and another for case if the user just denied (without any checkpoints).

This worked fine except for the cases when the user just starts the conversion with affirm or deny intent. But I conder that as uncooperative behaviour and I didn’t do anything to handle that.

If someone else has experience with this then please let us know.

3

This would work in theory, but my particular usecase branches down further in the deny story based on an “is_logged_in” slot, so I can’t fire action_restart before the affirmation/denial.

@Arjaan bestow upon me a shred of your everlasting wisdom!

4

Bumping this thread because its really important to the project I’m working on. Any help?

5

Did you figure this out ?

6

No, unfortunately. I ended up having to change around the overall structure of the conversation.