Chatbots – Copy Nodes and Duplicate Dialogues for easier development

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SAS Chatbots continue to gain attention as seen here in Sundaresh Sankaran’s SAS Global Forum 2021: Making Text Analytics More Approachable 

Check out my Chatbot Anatomy in SAS Conversation Designer article and its companion article written by Xavier Bizoux: Building a simple web interface for your chatbot for a better understanding of SAS’s Conversation Designer offering.

Copy Nodes

Introduced in the stable 2021.1.1 May 2021 release is the ability to Copy Nodes between Dialogues! This is an important feature as each Node can contain several properties, the Dialogue composition can include complex branching, and parameter references can easily become overwhelming while you are designing and testing out your bot flows.

Now you can use the Node’s overflow menu to select Copy --> Node or Copy --> With nodes below. You can only Copy Nodes inside the same bot, but to any Dialogue within the bot.

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Duplicate Dialogues

The Copy Nodes feature isn’t the same thing as being able to Duplicate entire Dialogues. The Duplicate is a great way to test new Dialogue features out! To do that, simply Duplicate a Dialogue then assign the Intent to the Dialogue path you want to test and on the Dialogue you don’t want to test, do not assign any Intent.

One nice aspect of this technique is that the actual name of the Dialogue isn’t needed for any of the downstream execution of the matching criteria in the Utterances and Entities. So feel free to name those duplicated dialogue paths creatively!

Additional Materials

• Sundaresh Sankaran’s SAS Global Forum 2021: Making Text Analytics More Approachable
• Teri Patsilaras': Chatbot Anatomy in SAS Conversation Designer
• Xavier Bizoux's: Building a simple web interface for your chatbot
• Chris Barefoot's: Giving Your Model a Voice SAS Conversation Designer and SAS
• SAS Support: SAS Conversation Designer

Find more articles from SAS Global Enablement and Learning here.