Service

Integrating with External Services for Data Exchange and Enhanced Functionality

Overview

A Service Block enables you to integrate external services or APIs into your dialog flow, enhancing functionality. This integration enables you to retrieve data, perform actions, or interact with external systems during a conversation, ultimately enriching the user experience and expanding Parloa's ability to handle complex inputs and interface with external systems.

Service Block

When you click on the Service block, a pane opens on the right, displaying two tabs: Branches and Variables.

The following describes the two tabs displayed above:

Branches

Each Service block must contain at least one branch to dictate the flow based on the response from the external service. In the provided example, there are two branches:

• success: This branch is followed if the external service returns a successful response.

• else: This branch is followed if the external service does not return a successful response.

Variables

The Variables tab is crucial for defining and managing the data exchanged with the external service or API. It consists of two parts:

• Service Input: Maps local variables to the input expected by the service.

• Service Output: Maps the service's response to local variables.

In the provided example:

• The utterance variable captures the input for spelling processing.

• The language variable is preset to 'en', designating English for the spelling service.

• The letters and numbers variables delineate the data types – alphabetic or numeric – the spelling service should expect.

• The Service Output section shows how the results (stored in the result variable) are mapped back to the utterance variable within the dialog flow, enabling the use of processed data in subsequent interactions.

The Service Output section indicates how the results from the spelling service (result) are mapped back to a variable (utterance) within the conversational flow. This allows the processed data to be used in subsequent interactions with the user.

Parloa services typically do not distinguish between different types of service errors. An exception is the Parloa API Adapter, which is documented separately.

Adding a Service Block

To learn how to add a Service, click here to refer to our Services documentation.