Posted On: Aug 17, 2023

AWS announces the general availability of the Confirmation slot type for Amazon Lex that enables developers to effectively capture “Yes” and “No” responses from users. Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application, using voice and text. With Amazon Lex, you can quickly and easily build sophisticated natural language conversational bots (“chatbots”), virtual agents, and interactive voice response (IVR) systems.

Until now, developers had to create custom slots to capture confirmation and denial responses from their users. This required adding multiple colloquial variations of phrases in the custom slot used for expressing confirmation. For example, to capture variations of “Yes”, developers added multiple synonyms such as “Yeah”, “That’s right”, “Correct” etc. With this launch, developers can now directly use the Confirmation built-in slot type for prompts used for confirmation. The Confirmation slot type can interpret variations in user inputs and effectively resolve it to one of the four values (‘Yes’, ‘No’, ‘Maybe’, ‘Don’t Know’). Developers can now quickly and efficiently create sophisticated conversation flows with multiple confirmation prompts as well as branch conversations based on user responses, enabling faster bot creation, improving user experience, and reducing maintenance overhead.

The Confirmation slot type is available for English locales in all AWS regions where Lex V2 operates. To learn more, visit the Amazon Lex documentation.