Triggering events

Correct handling of events and contexts is crucial for building a quality human-to-computer dialogue. We’ll get back to contexts in another article about NLP capabilities, so let’s discuss events for now.

Activechat is using the event-based flow model. This gives you extreme flexibility in the flow design. When any external or internal event is triggered, the bot can react with specific blocks and skills, which are parts of the flow.

For more details about events in Activechat check this article.

Each event can have a set of parameters that are being sent together with this event and can be read by the CATCH block. For example, each START event contains a payload parameter where ref-link or deep-link is stored.

Every CATCH block is constantly listening to all events in the bot, looking for the ones with specific names (and optionally – with a specific parameter value). When a specific event is broadcasted by SEND block in any of the bot skills (or generated in the system), this CATCH is passing control to the connected blocks.

Every chatbot skill in Activechat starts with the CATCH block listening to events with that skill name. So, when you need to trigger a specific skill in your conversation, just use the SEND block with that event name.