Building bots - Amazon Lex

Building bots

You create an Amazon Lex V2 bot to interact with your users to elicit information to accomplish a task. For example, you can create a bot that gathers the information needed to order a bouquet of flowers or to book a hotel room.

To build a bot, you need the following information:

  1. The language that the bot uses to interact with the customer. You can choose one or more languages, each language contains independent intents, slots, and slot types.

  2. The intents, or goals, that the bot helps the user fulfill. A bot can contain one or more intents, such as ordering flowers, or booking a hotel and rental car. You need to decide which statements, or utterances, that the user makes to initiate the intent.

  3. The information, or slots, that you need to gather from the user to fulfill an intent. For example, you might need to get the type of flowers from the user or the start date of a hotel reservation. You need to define one or more prompts that Amazon Lex V2 uses to elicit the slot value from the user.

  4. The type of the slots that you need from the user. You may need to create a custom slot type, such as a list of flowers that a user can order, or you can use a built-in slot type, such as using the AMAZON.Date slot type for the start date of a reservation.

  5. The user interaction flow within and between intents. You can configure the conversation flow to define the interaction between the user and the bot once the intent is invoked. You can create a Lambda function to validate and fulfill the intent.

Note

On August 17, 2022, Amazon Lex V2 released a change to the way conversations are managed with the user. This change gives you more control over the path that the user takes through the conversation. For more information, see Understanding conversation flow management. Bots created before August 17, 2022 do not support dialog code hook messages, setting values, configuring next steps, and adding conditions.