Introduction

Processes are Cognigy.AI's mechanism for guiding a user through a structured process whilst collecting and processing information.

In this guide, you will build a conversational Process that asks the user for their email address and executes a Process Action to update a hypothetical CRM system with the email address. You can read the full documentation about Processes.

1 Create a new Process

The first step of defining our Process is to create a new one in the Project Dashboard.

1. Click the + button in the Project Dashboard and click the Process button. Enter a name, e.g. Information Process.

2. You have the ability to define some of the settings for the Process, e.g. the sentence the user can say in order to exit the process. For now, you can just leave the default values as they are and click on Create.

You now have an empty process and are ready to start creating Process Elements.

2 Add Elements

A Process is made up of elements that will be executed in order from top to bottom. Click on the "+" button and you can select the element that you want to add:

There exist four different element types: Messages, Questions, Conditions and Actions.
We will now create one of each in this Process.

Message

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To add a new message to your Process, click on the MESSAGE button and double click on the newly created message element. This will open the element and allow you to input a message that will be sent as output to the user. You can use either Tokens, CognigyScript or write a simple text message you want to output. For now, just type in a welcome message: "Hi, I need to ask you some questions to continue with your order."

Once you have saved the Message, your process should look like this:

Question

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You can also ask questions to the user in order to collect data such as an email address.
Add a QUESTION element directly below the message element.
To edit the question, double click on the element.

The question element provides several Question Types that you can choose from, which is used to validate the user's message. For this guide, you should choose the Email Address type, which finds and validates the email address that the user enters and stores.

First, fill out the Question Text with the question you want to ask the user, e.g. "What is your email address?". The answer of the user will get stored in the Context utilizing the Answer Id. The Validation Message is used when the user enters something that does not match the Question Type (e.g. "12312" when we need an email address), you can change it to something like "This is not a valid email address. Please enter a valid email address.". Let's leave the rest of the options as is, save and continue.

Condition

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We want to look up if we already know the current user and we can use a CONDITION for this task. Just create a new Condition below the question. You will now see the default Condition node.

Open the Condition via the pencil icon or simply double click on it and remove the first "1". Your Condition should now look like this:

You can now click on the gray Cognigy icon or use CTRL + Space to bring up the Cognigy Tokens.

Select the "example_answer_id" for the first field and replace the second "1" with "[email protected]". Save it and your Process should now look like this:

If the input email is equal to "[email protected]", the condition will execute the THEN part, otherwise the ELSE part.

Action

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Last but not least we want to execute an Action. Actions are Flows which can be used in a Process to add advanced functionality.

1. Create a new Flow via clicking on the + button and choose the Flow. Give it a name like "process_action" and hit enter.

2. Add a Say Node to your Flow and add any text you want to it, for example, "Hey cool. This is an action.".

3. Within the Flow Editor, click on the Overview Button and enable the Process Action button in the Usage section.

Now you can add this Flow as an Action to your Process.

1. Go back to your Process.

2. Click on the + in the Then part of the Condition.

3. Add an Action and choose your defined Action Flow as the Target.

4. Save

Now you should see the following.

Now your first Process is ready for take off!

3 Run Process

1. Besides your ´Action Flow` create a new one and call it "Main".

2. Add the Run Process Node from the Logic menu.

Now you should see this:

Double click on the Node and edit it.

As ProcessId you have to choose your created Process. The results will be stored in the Cognigy Context, so you have to define the key, in this example as "myProcess".

If you're finished with editing, save the Node.

Now you can execute the "Main" Flow and get through the created Process.