question

mraalex avatar image
mraalex asked

Understanding Name-free Interactions

I have a problem of understanding the canfulfillintentrequest. I would like to provide an answer to the name-free question "Alexa, What to wear today". But to answer this question I need to know the position of the user.

If I change the sample utterance to "What to wear today {city}" and configure {city} as a required value then I can give an answer to this question. But I think most people will start with the question "What to wear today" without a city name.

Would Alexa consider my intent for the question "What to wear today" now?

Would it:

A) Send a CanFulfillIntentRequest with an empty city slot? And if I answer "maybe" it would try to fill the slot with auto delegation?

B) Do not consider my intent at all because there is no sample utterance without a city slot


In a name-based interaction I can either access location information (because the user allowed this when enabling the skill) or tell him to set the location using a different intent. But I guess this is not a solution for a name-free interaction.


So how can I design my utterances so that my intent is considered for the name-free question "What to wear today" and how can I get the city name? If I need to do a manual delegation please provide a pseudo example how this would look like.

canfulfillintentrequest
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1 Answer

Rokas avatar image
Rokas answered

To be fair with you, I wouldn't bother with CFIR, because it doesn't work as you might expect, there is a small chance that your skill will get picked for CFIR. Amazon team promised to do something more about name free invocations, but there are still no news about it. I answered a similar question in this thread: here.

Now if you still want to go through it, then CFIR gets an intent it matched in your interaction model with slot values if there are any. If alexa picks your skill as suitable, it will invoke your skill and then if you didn't get city name with CFIR, then you can ask user to provide it.

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